The Snope reply brief is in. This concludes the briefing for the cert petition (aside from any amicus briefs coming in support of the state).

Let's take a look at what they argued in response to Maryland's opposition. A strong opening here, basically telling the Court that if they don't put a stop to this, it will have only itself to blame when the abuse continues. I would only add that the reason the lower courts have all gone the same way is because the more pro-gun circuits never see such cases, being generally made up of more pro-gun states.

Let's take a look at Maryland's opposition brief to the cert petition in Snope v. Brown, the case we are all hoping the Supreme Court decides to take so it can settle the "assault weapon" issue (and hopefully some other issues).

Props to the Maryland attorneys for getting this done despite having to type through the tears of Kamala's loss. They always focus on this language from Heller, but ignore four things:

1. It was dicta inserted mainly to keep Justice Kennedy on board.

2. It was clearly referring to machine guns, not semiautomatic rifles.

3. Heller's author and Bruen's author dissented in Friedman from the denial of cert, and were very clear that semiautomatic rifles like the AR-15 may not be banned.

4. SCOTUS GVR'd this very case after Bruen. If they thought this was a settled question, no reason to do that (and it's why I'll be very mad if they deny cert now!)

A thread on our final judgment from Judge McGlynn in our case of FFL-IL v. Pritzker. We represented Federal Firearms Licensees of Illinois, Guns Save Life, Gun Owners of America, Gun Owners Foundation, Piasa Armory, and individual plaintiffs in this challenge to the euphemistically named "Protect Illinois Communities Act" (an "assault weapon" and magazine ban). The "Rorschach test of America's gun debate." I like that.

Note that California law classifies ALL Glocks as "unsafe handguns" because they do not have a compliant chamber load indicator, lack a magazine disconnect mechanism, and until our lawsuit caused California to repeal the requirement, of course lacked microstamping.

The only reason we can still buy Gen 3s is because they are grandfathered in, but they are still "unsafe handguns". We can't buy more modern Glocks new in gun stores (just secondhand from exempt cops, or from those who moved here with them from other states).

She supported the Unsafe Handgun Act and expanded it such that microstamping began to be enforced in 2013. So why does she own an "unsafe handgun"? If a Glock is "safe" enough for Kamala Harris, she should call for the repeal of the handgun roster so Californians can buy more modern Glocks.

The lives of millions of regular people aren't worth less than hers.

This 1890 congressional debate on a bill banning the carrying of weapons in Washington DC is interesting in how much it repeats so many things we are still arguing about to this day.

First, the text of the bill: Congressman Blount knew how this could be abused, even with the apparent allowance for open carry.

No, it absolutely isn't "just wrong". Let's just give one simple example: the fact that the Second Amendment covers an individual right.

The big names denied or obfuscated this for decades. Given that, even as an obviously biased lawyer, I expected that when I dug into 18th and 19th century commentary on the Second Amendment I'd find lots to support their view.

I found almost nothing of the sort. My thread on Second Amendment commentary pre-1900 is now over 60 entries long, each supporting the individual right to varying degrees, and each linked to the full source in Google Books for anyone who wants to confirm the context. I would only find out after I did this research that @davekopel did this same project several decades ago, and had already cited many of the sources I found again. I'm not sure why the debate didn't end then.

@2aHistory continued this work after I moved on from it, and he has found dozens more. We decided to find that many in order to preemptively rebut the claim that we were "cherry picking". We sure found a lot of "cherries"!

The mainstream historians, by contrast, had generally gone along with the lie that the individual right is something gun rights activists made up in the 1970s. Not one of them seriously deals with the overwhelming pre-1900 commentary confirming the individual right, which includes everyone from delegates of the constitutional convention, other contemporaries of the founders, Senators, Congressmen, abolitionists, early civil rights activists, famous legal scholars, and even President Grant.

Modern academics simply do not have a better understanding of the Second Amendment's scope and purpose than, well, everyone of any note who commented on the matter pre-1900. Period. If they suggest otherwise, they are engaging in activism, not history.

To be sure, there can be plenty of historical debate on the degree of gun control allowed. That is where the pre-1900 commentary is a bit more split and thus debatable. While everyone generally agreed there was an individual right to own and carry arms, and common rifles and handguns were included in that, that is where the agreement generally ends and the evidence gets more murky.

But the major historians never gave any apology for how wrong they were on the individual right. When they do engage with the pre-1900 commentary, it is to cite just a couple examples, claim they are "outliers", and move on. More often, they don't even seem to know it exists. None of them that I've seen honestly acknowledge the sheer weight of authority on this point. They continue to accuse the Supreme Court of "law office history" claiming they are taking history "out of context", but they never seriously explain why.

For example, when President Grant complained to Congress that the KKK was trying to deny newly freed former slaves their right to bear arms, what context support anything other than an individual right? Was President Grant concerned that black men would not be able to fight for the state militia of Alabama, Mississippi, or other former confederate states? Of course not. The only way the statement makes any sense is if their is an individual right whose existence was so obvious it wasn't even worth commenting on, except insofar as it was being denied to freedmen.

These prominent academics are also nauseatingly elitist. They all praise and cite each other, even when they are plainly wrong. @serow_man already pointed out how at least one of them (and probably more) praised Michael Bellesiles, who was proven to be a fraud. (And they continue to disparage Clayton Cramer in their expert reports, who was the one who proved their buddy Bellesiles was a fraud).

Their efforts to mislead continue to this day. They tell judges with a straight face that historical bowie knife carry restrictions are like modern bans on common rifles, knowing full well that the actually analogous weapons of the era (winchester rifles, colt revolvers) were never meaningfully regulated, and certainly not banned. They pretend concealed carry restrictions were the same as full carry bans, and we have to spend hours of work calling them out on it. On and on it goes.

The mainstream prominent historians have been getting their clocks cleaned because they are either engaging in groupthink at best, or outright lying at worst. They don't deserve to be taken seriously until they stop carrying water for the gun control movement. They are using credentialism to hide gun control activism. There is nothing wrong with activism, I'm an activist. But I don't hide it. They shouldn't either.

https://x.com/MorosKostas/status/1827873669164769460

Congrats to @2AFDN, @gunpolicy, and all other plaintiffs in Nguyen v. Bonta.

The panel has REVERSED the stay.

Fox News Poll* finds that Americans prefer Trump over Kamala on gun policy by three points, 50-47.

Suggests the overton window has indeed continued to shift in our favor, and squares with the Marquette Poll showing 69% approval for Bruen.

*which is actually a very highly rated pollster, despite its affiliation to the partisan news channel. static.foxnews.com/foxnews.com/co…

The 4th Circuit en banc reached its expected ruling in Bianchi, upholding Maryland's ban on common rifles.

What was unexpected was the speed of the ruling. I, and most others, thought they'd stall as long as possible so SCOTUS could not hear the case this term. And by then, who knows who is on SCOTUS, and Kamala could be picking replacements. Such hackery was even more expected after they took the crazy step of taking this case away from the three judge panel and going directly to en banc review.

So while I'm about to be very critical of what I expect will be a trash opinion, I will say something nice first: thank you 4th Circuit for not taking the hack approach and withholding a ruling to stall for time. And taking it away from the panel, in hindsight, moved this along faster than waiting for a ruling THEN doing an en banc anyway.

Now the pressure is on for SCOTUS. This case was previously GVR'd, and is a final judgment. No excuses for not granting cert. And no, waiting for a circuit split isn't a real answer, because the pro-gun circuits never hear AWB cases.

Anyway, let's take a look at the ruling. It's long, so this will be more of a skim than normal. This canard of "military small arms are not protected!" is completely ahistorical, and it is not true that the Second Amendment is solely about personal self-defense.

That said, AR15s and similar rifles are clearly also owned for self-defense, as even a WaPo survey confirmed.

Alright, let's take a quick look at some highlights from our amicus brief in US v. Allam before I call it a night.

The case is a rare opportunity for a friendly circuit to hear a "sensitive places" case, which is what caught our interest. At issue is the federal gun free school zones act, which blocks carry within a thousand feet of a school, subject to some exceptions. The case is not about carry on school campuses themselves, just the zones around them. The petitioner is not particularly sympathetic. But he is mounting a facial challenge, and so we approached this argument from the perspective of regular citizens.

My Rahimi live thread here. The basic holding is, as Chuck notes, "When an individual has been found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another, that individual may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment."

8-1 case.

ROBERTS, C. J., delivered the opinion for the Court, in which ALITO, SOTOMAYOR, KAGAN, GORSUCH, KAVANAUGH, BARRETT, and JACKSON, JJ., joined. SOTOMAYOR, J., filed a concurring opinion, in which KAGAN, J., joined. GORSUCH, J., KAVANAUGH, J., BARRETT, J., and JACKSON, J., filed concurring opinions. THOMAS, J., filed a dissenting opinion.

Getting my toddler breakfast, then we begin 🤣 First bit of good news comes at the start of the analysis. This language would seem to call into question laws that disarm AFTER a restraining order has ended. California bans people who had a restraining order from carrying for five years.

A thread on Garland v. Cargill. I am not a technical expert on firearms nor experienced in these sorts of agency rule challenges. But I'll do my best.

Notably, this case is not at all about Chevron deference - ATF disclaimed that and just argued their bump stock ban was faithful to the law, no deference required. This is the whole fight in this case. What does "single function of the trigger" mean?

I think it is pretty clear that bump stocks do not make it so that semiautomatic firearms can fire automatically with a single function of the trigger. They just essentially make the user pull that trigger faster.

It's kinda interesting how the Sears catalog often advertised guns for pocket carry. This one is from 1901.

"Expert" historians for the state like to claim that carry was uncommon in the 19th century. The large amount of ads boasting a handgun could be carried concealed seem to go against those claims.

Also amusing: Colts were by far the most expensive, and apparently did Apple-style price protection. In its Colt section, Sears complains Colt won't let them list the pistols any lower.

The old Sears catalogs are a ton of fun to look through, and not just for guns.

archive.org/details/catalo…

A short thread on the GOA/GOF reply brief. Prepared by the excellent @Stambo2A, Rob Olson, and Oliver Krawczyk. We work with them on several cases and it is always a pleasure.

Disappointing, if not at all unexpected decision. I’m not doing a full thread right now, but some especially erroneous portions.

Such as claiming that Teter said something outlandish and out of step, when it’s actually what THE SUPREME COURT SAID. Teter was just quoting the Supreme Court, as this acknowledges by mentioning (but ignoring) Heller. Incredible. There is no other right in the original Bill of Rights for which the “operative period” is the reconstruction era.

Paging @fourboxesdiner

California has filed its reply in May and Carralero, so here's a thread on some of my thoughts.

You can read it here:

Starting off, I won't speak for the Carralero plaintiffs, but our point was that such security is an indication of what government truly considers to be sensitive, as opposed to things it claims in bad faith are sensitive in order to restrict carry.drive.google.com/file/d/1hs8JXk… Bruen demands representative historical laws. If there are only a few outliers, then they are not representative of our historical tradition.

Circuit Courts could not give less of a shit that the Supreme Court said interest balancing analysis is not appropriate. They are doing it anyway, and blatantly.

Will SCOTUS do anything about it?

https://twitter.com/gunpolicy/status/1765849982744121769

All their historical analogues are from the 20th century, except for bowie knife laws. But those were carry laws, not possession bans.

The first of the three CRPA vs. LASD oppositions is in, from La Verne. Two more expected today from LASD and the Attorney General.

Granted I have my bias, but I am not impressed with this brief in the least. They cite almost no caselaw to support them, and their argument boils down to "other cities are doing it so we can too!".

On the psych exam, they don't address any of the points we made about why this particular exam is especially abusive, requiring a drive of an hour each way, only on weekdays. The DOJ brief is in now too, and I'm still reading through it, but it's interesting that they spend a lot of time justifying the idea of permits as a concept. That's not really our argument here. their point seems to be that local regulation is allowed, but California doesn't even provide a pathway for nonresidents to get a permit, let alone honor permits of other states.

As is often the case with a shooting that breaks into the national debate, we already see celebrities, media elites, and others lining up to talk down to conservatives about how heartless they are being for not passing more gun laws.

To understand this apparent conservative intransigence on guns, you have to be aware of a few points:

1. Conservatives do not have any power in most large cities. Kansas City, for example, has had only Democrat mayors since 1930, save for one exception who left office back in 1991. Given these cities have completely rejected them politically, conservatives don't feel particularly responsible for their plight.

2. Much of Hollywood hates conservatives and makes that clear. Being a conservative usually means making peace with the fact that most of the artists and other famous people you enjoy following despise your beliefs. Not all, to be sure, but a very large amount.

3. Conservative voters are often not particularly wealthy, with a number of rural towns struggling a lot in recent years. Drugs have become a major problem, as have deaths of despair more generally.

4. They've watched in horror as more and more cities have increasingly let criminals walk with little or no consequences. They also saw rioters go completely unpunished in 2020 because they were rioting for "the right reasons".

5. They increasingly do not identify with the prevailing values of many large cities, which they see as immoral and irresponsible.

6. They've always had guns, and lots of them. They grew up with them and are comfortable around them. There can be problems with guns, namely as a tool for suicide. But murder with them is rare.

So poverty, drugs, resentment, and lots of guns. According to the gun control orthodoxy, this should equate to a bloodbath, right?

Wrong.

Take Missouri as an example. It had 629 gun-related homicides in 2022, a dismal number. But 474 of those were in just two major cities - St. Louis and Kansas City. Dozens of smaller counties did not have a single homicide of any kind, gun-related or otherwise.

If Kansas City and St. Louis combined to form their own state with their two million total people, they'd have a gun-related homicide rate of 23.7 per 100,000 people. The rest of Missouri, with a remaining population of over four million people? 3.7 per 100,000. About six times less.

So popular culture, famous athletes and the major media come demanding of these people that they have to curtail their own rights, because cities in which they have no power can't get their shit together? When the leaders of those cities constantly talk down to them and despise them, no less?

Why would you expect these conservative-leaning populations to listen to your lectures? You've accepted none of their ideas, you've tried the same thing over and over for decades, and the resulting high violent crime is, to them, entirely predictable.

We've seen that it doesn't have to be this way. Look at what Mayor Suarez, one of the few Republican big city mayors, has accomplished in Miami.

Contrary to racist views that success in big cities are limited to those that are very white, Miami is a very diverse city where white people make up less than half the population. It also had a horrifyingly violent past in relatively recent history ("The Year of Dangerous Days" by Nicholas Griffin is quite a good read on that topic). In 1980, homicides in the city reached an astonishing 220 dead.

Last year, Miami had 31 homicides. That's the lowest in its history. In 1947, the first year they counted, it had 32, and the population back then was much lower than today. This is in a state that enacted constitutional carry recently too, for all those who warned that too would be a disaster. It hasn't been a problem.

So quit lecturing conservatives, quit demanding others compromise their rights, and quit voting for the same failed leadership pushing the same trash ideologies of government dependence, tolerance for criminality, and failure.

The continued devastation seen in cities like Kansas City is the CHOICE of its voters. And until they make a different one, they have only themselves to blame. Source:

cbsnews.com/miami/news/mia…

My first* law review article is now published. Coauthored with @CRPAPresident, we go through the overwhelming history that demonstrates that so-called "assault weapons" are what earlier generations would consider to be the most protected arms of all under the Second Amendment. Link below for those who want to read the final version.

*and with how much work this was, maybe it will be my only law review article.🤣 scholarship.law.uwyo.edu/cgi/viewconten…

The Hawaii Supreme Court released a ruling that sounds like Everytown wrote it for them. They say Heller was wrongly decided, and talk about the historical tradition of the former Kingdom of Hawaii as if that is at all relevant.

A lowlights thread. Note that this "crime" occurred pre-Bruen, when Hawaii had never issued any permit to anyone. So it's insane the State gets to argue he should have applied for a CCW permit.