I already have blogged a bit about various ways the Supreme Court’s landmark Second Amendment ruling in Bruen raises all sort of new and challenging questions about the enforcement of various federal criminal statutory provision (and I expect to be blogging more and more on these topics as the issues divide appeals courts). But yesterday, a Ninth Circuit panel directly considered (and quickly rejected) a claim that Bruen precludes application of a federal sentencing enhancement under the guidelines for possessing a firearm in conjunction with a federal drug offense. Here is how the ruling in US v. Alaniz, No. 22-30141 (9th Cir. June 13, 2023) (available here), gets started:
This case requires us to consider whether United States Sentencing Guidelines (“U.S.S.G.”) § 2D1.1(b)(1), which provides for an enhancement of the Guidelines calculation if a defendant possessed a dangerous weapon at the time of a felony drug offense, is constitutional under the Second Amendment following New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022). We conclude that, in light of a well-established historical tradition of regulation, Miguel Michael Alaniz did not have the right to “keep and bear arms” during and in close proximity to his criminal activities.
And here is part of the substance of the opinion (with footnoted omittes):
The government offers on appeal a number of founding-era statutes to prove a historical tradition of sentencing enhancements tied to firearm possession. We conclude that this historical tradition is well-established. Notably, several States enacted laws throughout the 1800s that increased the severity of punishment for certain felonies when weapons were possessed, but not necessarily used, during the commission of the crime. See, e.g., Commonwealth v....
