Anti-Gun Lawyer's SCOTUS Playbook: 3 Ways to Strip Your Rights

Haley Proctor's recurring SCOTUSblog column, "A Second Opinion," is not neutral legal commentary. It is a strategic litigation guide dressed up as scholarship—and the latest installment lays out a three-axis attack on your Second Amendment rights with the precision of a legal brief.

The framework is elegant and dangerous: restrict *who* can own firearms, restrict *what* firearms they can own, and shrink *where* they can carry them. Three tracks. Simultaneous pressure. One goal.

**This is not hypothetical. This is the plan.**

On the "who" axis, Proctor acknowledges that *United States v. Rahimi* (2024) was a real Second Amendment win—the Supreme Court confirmed the government must demonstrate a genuine historical tradition before disarming anyone, even someone with a criminal record. That ruling was a firewall. But Proctor immediately reframes it as a door still cracked open for creative disarmament schemes. That pivot is not accidental.

The "what" and "where" axes are where the real ambition lives. Those sections of the column function as a litigation menu—an invitation for sympathetic circuit courts to greenlight magazine bans, so-called "assault weapon" prohibitions, and ever-expanding gun-free zones. Proctor is not predicting the next wave of anti-gun lawsuits. She is helping design them.

This is how the legal left moves the needle without a single vote in Congress. They find a sympathetic circuit, construct a historically creative argument, and execute off a road map exactly like this one. No floor vote. No debate. Just a ruling—and your rights, quietly narrowed.

**The Bruen standard is your last line of defense.** Bruen requires courts to anchor any firearms regulation in genuine American historical tradition—not loose analogies, not "principles" stretched beyond recognition, not vibes about what the Founders might have wanted. Every time a court applies Bruen faithfully, gun owners win. Every time a court substitutes creative "analogues" for real history, rights erode—and they rarely grow back.

The cases to watch are already moving. "What" and "where" challenges are working their way toward SCOTUS right now. The next term could define the practical boundaries of your rights for a generation.

Read Proctor's column the way an opposing coach watches game film. Know the routes before they're run. Then back the legal organizations—Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation, NRA-ILA—that are litigating these cases before they reach the high court and the terrain is set.

**The blueprint is public. The question is whether the defense shows up.**