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!

Comments

[Sebastian Cremmington]

The Indiana concealed carry license holder hero vindicates the conservative justices—as long as violent felons can be prevented from getting a permit then more law abiding citizens carrying guns in public can only be a positive. And that is why I don’t support the so called constitutional carry laws—because violent felons will be the individuals taking advantage of guns in public not requiring a permit. Obviously violent felons will likely break the law anyway…but Giuliani shows enforcing gun regulations can be a big part of reducing violent crime.

[Frank Drackman]

sort of by definition "Violent Felons" would do what they want no matter what the law says.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

And Giuliani knew how to crack down on them—enforce gun control laws.

[Mr. Bumble]

Will you be sending a copy to the White House?

[Dan Schiavetta]

A bump stock to the main volume.

[Frank Drackman]

175 pages, IANAL but I can put it in one sentence, with a one sentence commentary

"A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed"
"Right", shall not be "Infringed", don't do it, ever.

Frank "Brevity is the soul of my Rapist's-like Wit"

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Violent felons can take guns onto domestic flights.

[Kleppe]

The left doesn't care about disarming violent felons. They care about disarming the vast majority of law-abiding gun owners. This is readily apparent.

[IsaacDanielcm]

They care about disarming ordinary white people.

[Frank Drackman]

and Box Cutters, Shoe Bombs, have you seen who works at TSA??, I'd say they were a bunch of slack jawed Imbeciles, but it would be insulting the slack jawed Imbeciles.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

Planes are gun free zones…and the least safe place people can be!

[Longtobefree]

If they are able to board a flight, at worst they are potentially violent ex-felons.
Once they serve their time, they should be fully restored to society. Voting, freely speaking, traveling, keeping and bearing arms, all of it.

[John F. Carr]

I wonder if lower courts will read _Bruen_ the same way as the authors of this supplement, or the Supreme Court majority in that case.

[Stephen Lathrop]

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.

Inadvertent hilarity. But entirely in keeping with the animating spirit of the historical, "analysis," in Bruen.

Neither the Court majority, nor Kopel here, shows the slightest insight that the historical task they pretend they can accomplish is maybe the hardest of all historiographic problems to work out, justify, or explain. What Kopel thinks he can do in 6 pages, the renowned historian and historiographer Michael Oakeshott took 48 pages to show is a task nearly impossible to do, without creating reasoning contradictions which defeat the objective. [Oakeshott, On History, Present, Future, and Past]

Anyone who supposes today's method of, "originalism," offers workable solutions—or that it ought to be trusted as a means to analyze present-day legal challenges such as gun controls—should have a try at reading Oakeshott. The arguments are brilliantly presented, but dauntingly complex. Nobody else has made them simpler. Good luck.

The complexity is inherent in the subject, and in the fact that much of the reasoning is as counter-intuitive as time-travel paradoxes served up by science fiction entertainments, and for the same reasons. The one thing I can promise is that almost anyone capable of mastering graduate-level historical training should be able to get enough insight out of two or three readings of Oakeshott to understand that Kopel and the Bruen majority spout nonsense in every sentence. But they lack any inkling that they are doing it.

For them, originalism gets treated as a means to enable them to delve into the past, intervene there in activities which cannot fail to alter ensuing circumstances—for instance by killing off their great, great, grandparents before they have children—and then to return to an unaltered present to contemplate their handiwork.

That is the quality of historical reasoning which Kopel and other would-be originalists serve up, again and again. You cannot even wonder how they think they do it. You know they don't give it a thought.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

But if carrying a gun is normal behavior then you just have to go about your day when you see someone carrying a gun. So conservatives want people to be able to carry guns into banks and onto domestic flights and if someone doesn’t have to show a permit then you have to allow the violent felon to carry the gun into the airplane.

[Frank Drackman]

sounds like somebody's being infringed.

[Longtobefree]

I suspect there is an additional fee for hunting licenses.

(why do you need a hunting license? Do bowlers need a license? Golfers?)

[defaultdotxbe]

Except it was already normal behavior before constitutional carry. Cops aren't stopping random people to do permit checks, the same way they don't stop random drivers to check for a license.

[DaivdBehar]

2A is for that Alaska election theft.

[Sebastian Cremmington]

So stop and frisk never happened?? Interesting. 😉

[Stephen Lathrop]

why do you need a hunting license?

Unregulated hunting is an activity which has shown a power to deplete wildlife resources to the point of practical or actual extinction. Surprised that anyone would be unaware of that.