After Heller, Bruen & Rahimi: The Gun Cases SCOTUS Is Watching

After Heller in 2008 established the individual right to keep and bear arms, the Supreme Court went almost completely silent on the Second Amendment for over a decade. Anti-gun judges in blue-state circuits exploited every minute of that silence — rubber-stamping magazine bans, permit schemes, and carry restrictions while gun owners got buried under unconstitutional laws with no relief in sight.

Then Bruen hit in 2022 and blew the doors off. Justice Thomas and the majority torched the old balancing tests and demanded something radical: the government must prove ANY gun restriction is rooted in America's historical tradition of firearm regulation. Period. Lower courts were sent scrambling, and dozens of cases got vacated and remanded for do-overs under the new standard.

Rahimi in 2024 complicated the picture slightly — the Court upheld a domestic violence firearms prohibition — but Alito and Thomas made clear in their concurrences that Rahimi was narrow, and the historical-tradition test from Bruen is still very much alive. Anti-gun governors like Newsom, Hochul, Pritzker, and Healey immediately tried to spin Rahimi as a green light to resurrect every restriction their courts had previously gutted. Don't let them gaslight you.

Right now, the appellate courts are packed with live 2A cases working their way back up — pistol brace rules, suppressor regulations, felon-in-possession statutes, assault weapons bans, and more. The Seventh, Ninth, and Fourth Circuits — all hostile territory for gun owners — are the courts to watch. Spanberger's Virginia is already eyeing new restrictions knowing the pipeline takes time. Every ruling that slips through before SCOTUS takes another case is a law that could land on YOUR doorstep.

The next Supreme Court 2A case isn't a question of if — it's when. Kash Patel's FBI and Acting AG Todd Blanche will play a critical role in how the federal government argues these cases. Watch who gets confirmed, watch what briefs DOJ files, and watch which circuit splits SCOTUS decides it can no longer ignore. The scoreboard is still being written.