Analysis on the Supreme Court’s major Second Amendment ruling

Today, the court offered a boost to the Biden administration backing a federal gun ban for domestic abusers. But all eyes are on some key decisions yet to be released. Whether former President Trump is prosecuted or protected from prosecution for actions taken while he was president. Whether the prosecution of January 6th rioters via an obstruction statute is lawful. And if a restrictive Idaho abortion ban, which is preventing some patients from getting treatment, can continue a case that comes almost two years to the day since the overturning of Roe V. Wade by the same court. Well, joining me now to discuss today's ruling as well as what lies ahead is Jessica Roth, professor of law at the Cardozo Law School, and Stephen Mazie, the Supreme Court correspondent for The Economist. Welcome both of you. Let me start with you, Jessica. Just your reaction to this near unanimous decision, which for the first time, I believe in recent history at least, narrowed the scope of the Second Amendment as opposed to really interpreting it in a more expansive way. Well, it was really important what the court said in this decision, and it was notable that it was an 8 to one decision upholding the law that makes it illegal for somebody who is subject to a domestic violence restraining order from possessing a firearm. And the court applied the approach it articulated in the Bruin case, which had been this expansive ruling in favor of Second Amendment rights. And it said in this majority opinion, again, for eight members of the court, that this particular law prohibiting people subject to an order of domestic violence was consistent with the test articulated in Bruin. And it said that lower courts had perhaps been misunderstanding what the court had said in Bruin and specifically that it wasn't necessary for the government to to identify a regulation or restriction on gun possession at the founding that was identical to the restriction that the government wanted to adopt in modern times. It just had to be similar enough. And there's really interesting language in the opinion saying basically that our law is not fixed in amber. It can, in a sense, be evolving. And so those were really important statements in the court, in the opinion for the court, as well as the ultimate holding that this gun restriction was valid. Yeah. The Chief Justice who wrote for the majority stated that our tradition of firearm regulation allows the government to disarm individuals who present a credible threat to the physical safety of others. Steven, are you surprised that the lone dissent did come from Clarence Thomas, given that he was the one who wrote the opinion for the 2022 case, Really expanding the scope of the 2nd Amendment beyond a not a surprise at all. I was looking back at the article I wrote after the oral argument, and I said it looks like it's a large majority even of the conservatives to uphold this law. But Clarence Thomas might not. And indeed he didn't. I mean, this is this was a case where you had a plaintiff who was as the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, the court below called him, not a model citizen. That's kind of the understatement of the year. He's a man who threatened his girlfriend with a gun, who shot at a bystander who after the domestic order, the the order to protect her from him was instituted, continue to use his gun shooting up homes and fast food restaurants and trucks on the highway. So he's the one who was arguing, hey, I've got a Second Amendment right to have a gun. And the the oral argument did not go well for his lawyer. But it this was an interesting case because it's a case where the court was reckoning with its own very expansive decision from 2022, which we talked about together two years ago almost to the day. And it needed to find a way to narrow that very broad ruling. And what Justice Thomas said was, hey, I wrote that ruling and this is what it means. And it means that this ban on handguns for domestic abusers subject to restraining orders is unconstitutional.