The Courts Killing Your Gun Rights, Circuit by Circuit

The Supreme Court's *Bruen* and *Rahimi* decisions rewrote the rules — but anti-gun lower courts are still running the map. SCOTUSblog's latest deep dive by legal analyst Haley Proctor shows exactly how the battlefield is drawn.

Proctor's recurring column "A Second Opinion" breaks down the who, what, and where of gun control litigation — and the picture is ugly. Federal circuits are split, activist judges are defying *Bruen*'s historical-tradition test, and millions of law-abiding gun owners live under different constitutional realities depending purely on their zip code.

That's not federalism. That's a rigged system.

The Ninth Circuit keeps green-lighting California and Hawaii's strangling restrictions. The Fourth Circuit has given Maryland and New Jersey room to ban entire classes of commonly owned firearms. Gun owners in Texas and Florida enjoy protections their fellow Americans in blue states are actively denied by robed legislators holding lifetime appointments.

The core legal question isn't complicated: *Bruen* demands that any gun restriction be rooted in the historical tradition of firearm regulation at the Founding. Period. But lower court judges appointed by Barack Obama and Joe Biden keep twisting that standard into a pretzel to justify whatever ban their political allies want.

The Justice Department needs to get aggressive about which cases get fast-tracked to the High Court. The longer this circuit chaos persists, the more states exploit the confusion to pile on new restrictions — magazine bans, permit requirements, so-called "assault weapon" prohibitions — betting SCOTUS won't take up every case.

That's a smart bet. SCOTUS takes fewer than 80 cases a year. Anti-gun politicians in Sacramento, Annapolis, and Trenton push more restrictions than that on their own.

The Second Amendment is not a regional privilege. It is a federal constitutional right, guaranteed to every American regardless of whether their governor thinks you're smart enough to own a firearm.

Know your circuit. Know your cases. Demand your senators confirm federal judges who read the Constitution instead of rewriting it.

Find your representatives at house.gov and senate.gov — and remind them that "shall not be infringed" applies in every time zone.