The U.S. Supreme Court last year issued a potentially devastating ruling for communities beleaguered by gun violence, striking down New York’s law regulating concealed weapons in public. The ruling employed the controversial legal theory of constitutional originalism: interpreting the Constitution based strictly on the original understanding of its text at the time it was adopted.
Lower courts have since applied this standard to rule that restraining orders for domestic violence can’t bar individuals from obtaining weapons, and that it’s OK to file the serial numbers off of guns — since neither domestic violence protections nor the modern law enforcement tool of serial numbers were common when the Constitution was written in 1787. These and other rulings highlight how unworkable it is to hobble modern gun policy based on standards of the front-loading-musket era.
The high court last week allowed a revised New York gun restriction to stand pending continuing litigation. But Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas, originalism’s two loudest proponents on the court, issued an ominous joint statement stressing that it was a procedural decision — and encouraging the law’s opponents to continue their challenges.
