Last week, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled in United States v. Hemani that marijuana use does not automatically nullify the user’s Second Amendment rights.
However, along with Justice Sonya Sotomayor, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a concurring opinion took the opportunity to criticize the high court’s 2022 Bruen decision.
The pair urged the bench to revisit the ruling and “retire the failed Bruen experiment.” Brown Jackson dismissed the landmark gun rights decision as rooted in meaningless history.
Jurists believe Bruen’s ‘history and tradition’ test is irrelevant in 2026
“It imposes on judges the unfamiliar and difficult tasks of sifting through centuries-old evidence in order to answer ‘contested historical questions’ and ‘applying those answers to resolve contemporary problems,’” Brown Jackson argued in the opinion as reported by Law and Crime.
“Given those challenges, it is unsurprising that Bruen’s test is vulnerable to inconsistent and arbitrary application, as judges draw different conclusions from the same historical evidence and reach divergent assessments of the same law,” the jurist claimed.
Much like judges commonly do on many other legal matters, which is why we have a Supreme Court.
Gun rights opponents do not have the power to overturn Bruen–yet
Jonathan Lowy is president of Global Action on Gun Violence, and while he agreed that “a gummy at bedtime” should not cancel Second Amendment rights, he echoed Brown Jackson’s view that the Founding Era should have no influence on modern gun laws.
“Twenty-first century gun violence can’t be solved with 18th-century solutions,” Lowy declared.
It is important to note that, even as gun rights expanded in recent years and millions more Americans exercise this freedom, violence is in a steep decine in most of the country.
The current composition of the Supreme Court and Congress mean that, for the moment, Bruen is safe. But that is subject to change, and any tilt in power could mean that the ruling responsible for enhancing gun rights for all law-abiding Americans is in trouble.
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