The Supreme Court Made Some New Gun Policy: More Guns, Everywhere, All the Time

The Supreme Legislature of America has made some new rules, including a tasty treat that will lead us to a world where a lot more people on the New York subway are packing heat. But there are already guns in New York, says some guy in Ohio. Black-on-Black crime! Chicago! Welp, you're getting what you wanted, my guy: the law-abiding citizens can do their John Wayne thing pretty much anywhere they like now. Thanks to Thursday's ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, New York's 110-year-old law sharply restricting the concealed carry of firearms in public has been struck down. New York's "may issue" licensing regime, where people looking to carry had to demonstrate some extraordinary need to carry a gun in self-defense, is out. It's now a "shall issue" state, where vastly more people who say they need to carry a gun around will be able to get a license to do so.

So if there's a bad guy with a gun, the good guys can shoot it out with him, as we all entertain the notion that this won't end with more dead bystanders. Cops perform worse in these pressure situations, but we're supposed to believe largely untrained and untested civilians are going to hit the bullseye when the heat is on. Some guy threatening you? Pull out your gun. More guns, everywhere, all the time. Got a gun problem? Rub some guns on it. You got shot? Should have had gun. To shoot the other guy. Before he shoots you. And again, no big deal if it's a crowded subway car. Maybe a bunch of other people will be strapped, too.

These are the more pragmatic considerations when living in a patently insane country. The United States of America has lost its mind, thanks in no small part to a conservative movement that has seized control of the Judiciary Branch and begun making policy through its highest court. Who needs Congress when you have SuperCongress, a group of nine people in very serious robes where you have an unassailable majority? And this majority signaled it had ruled on this case as soon as oral arguments kicked off. The question at issue was whether the individual right to bear arms in the home for self-defense, established by Justice Antonin Scalia in 2008's Heller v. District of Columbia, also extended outside the home. In his questioning back in November, Justice Samuel Alito signaled he'd already decided. He took the question at issue as a premise for his questioning.

And today's ruling brought further indication that this was all foreordained. Justice Clarence Thomas's majority opinion treats that Heller decision as gospel, the word of God, even if it was cooked up fourteen years ago by his best buddy Scalia. A federal judge appointed by George W. Bush cited 700 years of English and American precedent for the authority of local jurisdictions to regulate arms in the public square in a decision upholding Hawaii's concealed-carry law. (In fact, until recently, gun-control laws were almost never struck down.) The New York law is 110 years old, but it was struck down on the basis of a new standard for gun-control regulation Thomas just created, where the government must affirmatively prove that any policy is "part of the historical tradition." Yet this decision itself is almost entirely built on Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, the latter of which held the 14th Amendment ensures the 2nd Amendment—as newly interpreted under Heller—applies to state laws. Both of these decisions are younger than the iPhone. The Second Amendment is very old, but it did not enshrine the individual right to bear arms in self-defense until fourteen years ago, and that did not apply to carrying guns in the public square until about an hour ago.

Some observers are clinging to a concurring opinion from Justice Brett Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, holding that state laws requiring a license for concealed carry are still constitutional, which the majority opinion also backs in a footnote. The footnote also reserves the right to throw these laws out in the future, though, and there is no reason to believe any kind of balance will be lasting or permanent. The march right goes forever on. Even Scalia's Heller decision made explicit room for the continued regulation of firearms, but Thomas's in Bruen seems to be a ready-made pretext to throw out all kinds of gun control laws in the future.

And by the way, let's just take a step back here and note that the good news is that some justices think it's probably legal for states to REQUIRE PEOPLE TO GET A LICENSE TO CARRY A GUN AROUND IN PUBLIC. Our supreme overlords have granted that, should they choose to do so, some states can require people to pass a background check or take a firearm safety class before they can carry a gun. That is the moderate position: maybe we should have some sort of permitting process before some random schmuck can carry a deadly weapon in the supermarket parking lot. Whereupon he can get in a fight with some other schmuck over a space near the door, or how loudly he's playing his music, or whatever. Meanwhile, people who carry guns around—an act which inherently communicates the threat of violence—insist observers who point out the threatening nature of this behavior are wacky wokescolds.

This country is completely nuts and quite possibly beyond redemption. There probably aren't many gun policies that would make much of a difference at this point, what with the 400 million guns already in circulation. The prognosis for a deeply divided country, awash in paranoid delusion and deadly weapons, is not good. But this willingness to double down on the anarchic insanity, to make possible a world where everyone is carrying a deadly weapon all the time to fight off all the other people in possession of deadly weapons, is just another level of American awful. If I feel I have to carry a gun because everyone else has a gun, is that freedom? It's certainly good for gun manufacturers. But it feels a lot farther from liberty than it is from tyranny. The gun people have successfully imposed their way of life on the rest of us. There is no sanctuary from the very normal folks who feel compelled to carry a gun on their hip for the trip to Chipotle. It's their world, we're just living in it—while the rest of the world looks on in horror. The global hegemon, the supposed keeper of order, seems determined to turn life within its own borders into the state of

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