“This approach will now be parsed and followed by judges all across the country, forced to play as amateur historians, looking for analogies,” the Brennan Center’s Michael Waldman writes of Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. “The most dangerous part of the ruling was the Court’s new doctrine that all gun regulation now must be assessed only by looking at history and tradition.”
In Bruen, Thomas used a shallow interpretation of the Second Amendment to strike down the Sullivan Act, a New York State statute making concealed weapons illegal. The New York State Legislature passed the Sullivan Act in 1911, as semiautomatic pistols came on the market.