2022 Supplement for Firearms Law and the Second Amendment

Learn about all the important developments in the last year

I am delighted to announce the publication of the free, online 2022 Supplement for the law school textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy (Third Edition). My coauthors on the Supplement and the third edition of the textbook are Nicholas J. Johnson, George A. Mocsary, E. Gregory Wallace, and Donald Kilmer.

The Supplement is 175 pages, and covers developments since the summer of 2021, when the textbook entered final production. The Supplement begins with 98 pages on the Supreme Court's June 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. Most of that material is the Bruen opinion, plus the three concurrences, and the dissent, all in full. Our version may be a little easier on the eyes than the slip opinion on the Court's website, or versions on other sites, since we take the liberty of removing some parallel cites (e.g., to Lawyer's Ed. 2d), and we make some adjustments to the Court's idiosyncratic abbreviation style (e.g., we use "U.S" instead of "U. S.").

More importantly, we also provide a six-page explanation of the "Bruen Rules," such as Bruen's instructions on how to draw analogies from historic gun control laws to modern ones, and on Bruen's permissible limits on the right to bear arms.

In the usual pattern for textbook supplements, there are many short summaries of important new cases, statutes, and so on. Some topics that receive extended treatment include:

• The ATF's actions against forced reset triggers.
• An in-depth analysis of the major new federal gun control law, the June 2022 "Bipartisan Safer Communities Act." This is a guest essay by Professor Robert Leider.
• An explanation by attorney Johanna Reeves of the ATF's new "Frame or Receiver" rule.
• A major excerpt from the 9th Circuit's Jones v. Bonta, which upheld a California statute that young adult long gun buyers (18-20) must first obtain a hunting license, and which held unconstitutional a ban on them acquiring semiautomatic rifles.
• An essay on armed citizen defense in Ukraine.

We hope you find the Supplement useful!