Dangerous, but not Unusual: Mistakes Commonly
Made by Courts in Post-Bruen Litigation
MARK W. SMITH*
Mark W. Smith is a Visiting Fellow in Pharmaceutical Public Policy and Law in the Department of
Pharmacology, Oxford University and a Distinguished Scholar and Senior Fellow of Law and Public
Policy, Ave Maria School of Law. He hosts the Four Boxes Diner YouTube Channel (https://www.
youtube.com/@TheFourBoxesDiner), which addresses Second Amendment scholarship, history and
issues, and whose educational videos have been viewed over 37 million times. His scholarship has been
cited by federal courts and by attorneys before the United States Supreme Court in NYSRPA v. Bruen and
TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 601
I. PLAIN TEXT ANALYSIS: THE SECOND AMENDMENT’S UNQUALIFIED
TEXTUAL COMMAND . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 603
II. THE BURDEN SHIFTS: ONCE THE TEXT OF THE SECOND
AMENDMENT IS IMPLICATED, THE BURDEN SHIFTS TO THE
GOVERNMENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 604
III. THE FORK IN THE CONSTITUTIONAL ROAD: HAS THE SUPREME
COURT ALREADY SET FORTH THE CONSTITUTIONAL TEST THAT
GOVERNS THE MODERN FIREARMS LAW AT ISSUE? . . . . . . . . . . . . 605
A. Path 1: Cases where the Supreme Court has Already Decided
the Governing Constitutional Test . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 606
B. Path 2: Cases where the Supreme Court Has Not Yet Decided
the Constitutional Test to be Applied . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 607
1. Analogues Must Be Government Regulations and Not
Generic Historical Narratives or Other Secondary
Sources ........................................... 607
2. Not All History Is Created Equal: Analogues Must Be
From the Relevant Time Period ...................... 609
3. Racist or Unconstitutional Laws Cannot Be Analogues . . . 612
4. Analogues must be sufficiently “well-established” and
“representative”.................................... 614
5. The “Why” and the “How” Of A Proposed Analogue and
the “Why” and “How” of the Challenged Modern Law
Must Match Up .................................... 615
*
599
6. A Lack of Historical Regulations Favors the Second
Amendment ....................................... 616
7. Dicta cannot save the government from its burden of
supplying actual historical analogue laws ........... 618
IV. CONTEMPORARY TYPES OF PENDING SECOND AMENDMENT
CHALLENGES AND THE CONSTITUTIONAL QUESTIONS THEY
PRESENT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619
A. Arms-Ban Laws. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 619
B. Restrictions Imposed on 18-20 Year Olds. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 621
C. Government-Mandated Gun Free Zones or Sensitive Places. . . 621
D. Licensing Regulations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 622
E. Gun and Ammunition Tax Challenges . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 623
V. COMMON MISTAKES MADE BY LOWER COURTS AFTER HELLER
AND BRUEN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624
A. Common mistakes made in arms ban cases . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 624
1. Heller’s “in common use” test governs in all arms ban cases
and cannot be ignored, changed, or circumvented........ 624
2. The burden is on the government to prove that an arm is
unusual and not “in common use”... ................. 626
3. The Test Is Not “In Common Use for Self-Defense”.... 627
4. The language from Bruen regarding technological
changes and societal concerns is not a legal test . . . . . . . 630
5. In arms ban cases, “in common use” is the test and lower
courts err when they ignore that test and then engage in
the Bruen historical methodology anew ............... 633
6. Courts are not justified in ignoring or altering the “in
common use” test simply because they disagree with it,
or in short-circuiting it by importing empirical tests into
the “plain text” inquiry.............................. 636
7. It is improper to import substantive, empirical tests into
the initial threshold “plain text” inquiry ............... 638
B. Discretionary Licensing Regimes. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 639
C. Mistakes in Cases Challenging Gun Restrictions Imposed on
Young Adults. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 643
600 THE GEORGETOWN JOURNAL OF LAW & PUBLIC POLICY [Vol. 22:599
D. Government-Mandated Gun Free Zones a/k/a “Sensitive
Places”. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 644
CONCLUSION. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 653
INTRODUCTION
When the U.S. Supreme Court decided New York State Rifle & Pistol
Association v. Bruen, it provided the lower courts with a detailed roadmap to
ensure proper application of the text-first and history-second methodology
employed by the Court in the Second Amendment context since District of
Columbia v. Heller. Yet notwithstanding the Court’s explicit directions, many
lower courts fail to follow Bruen and either take a wrong turn or implement their
own shortcuts when deciding constitutional challenges to modern-day firearm
restrictions. Some of these cases arose as challenges to gun control laws enacted
defiance of that decision. This article seeks to clarify some of the confusion that
has arisen post-Bruen, and to explain how the Supreme Court’s clear reasoning
ance that lower courts are bound to follow in cases implicating the constitutional
right to bear arms.
Court to put Second Amendment jurisprudence back on the right track.
Following the Heller decision in 2008, which embraced an originalist text-first,
history-second interpretive approach, many lower courts declined to follow
Heller’s originalist methodology. Instead, those courts imported interest bal-
ancing tests, such as intermediate scrutiny, from the context of the First
Amendment. By balancing the government’s asserted interest in “public
safety” against the degree that a law infringes on the right to keep and bear
arms, it was possible to guarantee that in virtually every case the government
would win, and fundamental constitutional rights would be eroded. That hap-
pened even though Heller expressly rejected interest-balancing.
Fourteen years later, Bruen made it clear beyond any doubt that interest balanc-
ing cannot be used to decide Second Amendment cases. It instructed that the plain
text of the Second Amendment must be faithfully followed, and that the govern-
ment bears the burden to justify any modern regulations, if it can, using historical
rejected interest-balancing as an acceptable Second Amendment framework for
the lower courts to apply.
Part I of this article identifies the principles and holdings to be followed in all
Second Amendment cases faithfully applying Heller’s and Bruen’s text-first and
history-second methodology. It also describes what the Court meant when it ref-
erenced the Second Amendment’s “unqualified command.”
2024] DANGEROUS, BUT NOT UNUSUAL 601
