The Supreme Court has taken up a Second Amendment challenge to a pair of AR-15 sales bans. It's one of the most consequential in the Court's history of gun cases.
To discuss it, we have someone who has been around for that entire history and played a major role in shaping the Court's Second Amendment jurisprudence. Lawyer Stephen Halbrook joins the show to explain that history and provide insight into how it will likely rule in the AR case.
Halbrook said the legal landscape was very different when he first started studying the issue. At that time, the idea that the Second Amendment protects much of anything was out of favor with the lower courts. Instead, he said, the collective-right formulation was the most widely accepted.
He noted it was a fairly small cohort of lawyers and academics that changed the legal landscape on the Second Amendment. He said the individual-rights formulation caught on quickly and culminated in the 2008 DC v. Heller decision. From there, the Court incorporated the Second Amendment right to own guns to the states in McDonald v. Chicago and then recognized the right to carry outside the home in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen.
Halbrook said the Court added to its pro-gun precedents in the two cases it decided this year, and he expects it'll do the same again when it decides the AR-15 ban. He also provided some specific insight into why he believes the Court will go that direction and which justices are the ones to watch.
Stephen Gutowski
Stephen Halbrook