How Anti-Gun Lawyers Are Mapping Your Rights Out of Existence

The Supreme Court's *Bruen* decision was supposed to settle this. Instead, anti-gun lawyers are circuit-shopping for courtrooms willing to gut it.

SCOTUSblog's ongoing 'Second Opinion' series by Haley Proctor maps the emerging legal geography of Second Amendment litigation — and the picture is ugly. Blue-state courts keep inventing new readings of *Bruen*'s historical test, deliberately building circuit splits to drag the fight back to a hostile Supreme Court on their terms.

Here's the playbook: file in sympathetic circuits, lose slowly enough to build a record, then pray for a different Court. California, New York, and Illinois have all run this stall-and-litigate strategy to keep unconstitutional restrictions on the books for years — while law-abiding gun owners foot the legal bills.

The who matters too. This isn't just rogue state legislators — it's activist attorneys general and local prosecutors who selectively enforce laws against legal gun owners while career criminals walk free. These officials bet you'll quit before the courts sort it out.

The where is the whole game. The Ninth Circuit. The Second Circuit. Anti-gun litigators don't file in Texas — they file in San Francisco and Manhattan for a reason. Those are the killing fields for constitutional rights.

Since *Bruen* and *Rahimi*, the Court has handed Second Amendment advocates the strongest legal framework in American history. Acting AG Todd Blanche and the DOJ need to throw their weight behind gun owners fighting these battles in hostile circuits instead of letting patriots stand alone against state-funded legal armies.

The constitutional text hasn't changed. 'Shall not be infringed' still means exactly what it says. But until the Court takes up every manufactured circuit split and slams the door permanently, anti-gun bureaucrats will keep drawing new maps to erase your rights by zip code.

Know your circuit. Know your cases. And fund the legal organizations — SAF, GOA, FPC — fighting these battles in courtrooms right now so your rights survive in every corner of this country.