By John Kruzel
WASHINGTON, June 26 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court in a pair of new rulings has further expanded the Constitution’s Second Amendment right “to keep and bear arms,” as the justices consider whether to take up additional gun rights cases for their next term.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling on Thursday powered by its conservative majority, struck down a Hawaii law that required gun owners to get an owner’s permission before bringing a handgun onto private property open to the public, such as most businesses.
The justices decided unanimously last week to limit the application of a decades-old federal law that bars firearms possession by certain drug users, narrowing a measure that had threatened the gun rights of millions of Americans who use marijuana and own firearms.
In a nation deeply divided over how to address persistent firearms violence including frequent mass shootings, these rulings underscored the court’s generally sympathetic approach toward protections enshrined in the Second Amendment.
The decisions, experts said, stiffened an already stringent legal test that gun control measures must clear in order to survive scrutiny under the amendment, ratified in 1791, that states, “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.”
‘EXTREME SKEPTICISM’
Pepperdine University Caruso School of Law professor Jacob Charles said, “The two cases confirm the court’s extreme skepticism about all manner of gun regulations, especially new ones.”
“It has created and elaborated a test that makes it exceedingly difficult for legislatures to create gun laws to protect their citizens,” Charles said of the court.
The rulings were issued as the justices near the end of their current term, which began last October.
Gun rights advocates, fresh off their recent legal victories, expressed hope that the court would take up additional Second Amendment cases for its next term, which begins in October.
The justices on Thursday gathered for their weekly private conference. Challenges to the legality of state restrictions on assault-style rifles, such as AR-15s, and large-capacity ammunition magazines were among the appeals up for consideration for court review. Those cases could be taken up as soon as Monday to be heard in the coming term.
Stephen Stamboulieh, an attorney with the pro-Second Amendment group Gun Owners of America, said that “it’s past time for the court to enforce” its prior rulings against such measures.
“It is critical that the Supreme Court take an AR-15 and magazine case and end the lower courts’ rebellion against the court’s precedents,” Stamboulieh said.
When the Supreme Court last year turned away appeals in similar lawsuits, three of its conservative justices dissented from the decision to reject the appeals.
A fourth conservative justice, Brett Kavanaugh, expressed sympathy toward the argument by the challengers that AR-15s are in common use by “law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment.” Kavanaugh said the court “presumably will address the AR-15 issue soon.”
The court is also considering whether to take up a challenge to a U.S. government ban on federally licensed firearms dealers selling handguns to adults under the age of 21, and similar state law measures.
THE BRUEN TEST
In both new gun rights rulings, the court applied a legal test that emerged from a landmark 2022 decision authored by conservative Justice Clarence Thomas in a case called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Under the so-called Bruen test, gun control measures must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” — not simply advance an important government interest — in order to comply with the Second Amendment.
Applying that test in the 2024 case of U.S. v. Rahimi, the court in an 8-1 ruling upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns — the only law to survive the Bruen test unscathed at the Supreme Court to date.
David Kopel, a Second Amendment expert at the libertarian Independence Institute think tank, said the dangerousness of domestic abusers is what set the Rahimi decision apart from the two recent rulings.
“Peaceable people who use marijuana, and persons with concealed-carry permits, are not dangerous,” Kopel said, referring to the plaintiffs in the recent gun rights cases.
“The broad historic traditions invoked by Bruen point towards a dangerousness standard as the rule for when some Americans can be disarmed,” Kopel added.
Hawaii officials had contended that the state’s law had struck a proper balance between the right to bear arms and the right of property owners to exclude guns from their property.
Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a written dissent, accused the court’s conservatives of having “manipulated” the Bruen test “into a free-for-all that lets the judiciary thwart the will of legislatures by privileging access to firearms above all else.”
Pepperdine’s Charles dismissed the notion advanced by some of the court’s conservatives that the right to keep and bear arms is being treated like a “second-class right.”
“The court’s doctrine has elevated the Second Amendment right far above a first-class right,” Charles said.
(Reporting by John Kruzel; Editing by Will Dunham)
Comments