Erich Pratt writes for the Federalist about the U.S. Supreme Court’s questionable record on Second Amendment issues.
The Supreme Court just issued a decision allowing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to rewrite the nation’s gun laws. It appears that the seven justices have contracted a bad case of “Gun Derangement Syndrome,” or GDS — a serious infection that afflicts many on the federal bench.
The symptoms are this: when firearms are involved, the judicial rulebook goes out the window. Originalism is ignored, basic principles of statutory interpretation overlooked, and new rules of law invented. What’s left is nothing that passes for reasoned decision-making; it’s the implementation of judges’ personal policy predilections.
Until recently, the Supreme Court seemed immune to this illness. After nearly all federal circuits mused that the Second Amendment did not so much as protect an individual right to bear arms, District of Columbia v. Heller set the record straight. And after lower courts devised “judge-empowering interest-balancing tests” to circumvent Heller, The New York State Bar Association v. Bruen course-corrected.
But recently, cracks have begun to show. Chief Justice John Roberts’ opinion in United States v. Rahimi, for example, arguably waters down Bruen’s rigorous requirement that governments must justify firearms laws with historical analogues — directing courts merely to follow the “principles that underpin the Nation’s regulatory tradition,” whatever that means. So wishy-washy was the Rahimi opinion that Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence to remind everyone that Bruen is still good law.
But now, Gorsuch seems to have contracted GDS as well. Authoring the court’s Bondi v. VanDerStok decision, he (and six others) sanctified ATF’s decision to redefine unfinished firearm frames and receivers and so-called “weapons parts kits” as actual “firearms” under federal law. That way, unfinished blocks of plastic and metal are subject to all the paperwork, tracking, and de facto registration that applies to actual firearms.
VanDerStok upholds a Biden-era diktat outlawing the longstanding American tradition of personal gunmaking, succumbing to the left’s hysteria over privately made firearms, and slapping these DIY projects with the pejorative label “ghost gun.” But why?
