Militia bearing arms limits state bans

The Second Amendment protects "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms," and while I cannot have known the semiautomatic rifle, the structural principle is clear enough: that right was understood at the founding to encompass arms suited to militia service — meaning the weapons a citizen-soldier might bring from home to muster. If the legislature may ban entire categories of arms in common civilian use, it renders the Amendment a hollow form, preserving only the right to own what the government magnanimously permits. The Bruen framework asks the right question: does a historical tradition of analogous regulation exist? Bans on categories of arms, as opposed to regulations on manner and condition of keeping, find thin support in founding-era practice. A state may regulate; it may impose conditions; but to prohibit outright what millions of citizens lawfully possess for defense stretches legislative authority past the boundary the compact drew.

Government must retain power to regulate dangerous arms

The question before the Court is not whether citizens may keep arms — that right I would not contest — but whether a legislature retains the power to draw a line around weapons that exist on a different order of destructive capacity than anything the Founders could have conceived. When I wrote of the general welfare and the broad construction of federal power, I understood that the instrument must be adequate to the object. The object here is public order and the safety of the republic's citizens. A musket and a semiautomatic rifle chambered for a military cartridge are not the same instrument any more than a sailing sloop is the same as a nuclear submarine. The "common use" test, applied without judgment, becomes a ratchet — the more a dangerous weapon proliferates, the more protected it grows. That is not constitutional reasoning; that is circular logic dressed in historical costume. Legislatures must retain meaningful authority to regulate arms whose primary utility is mass lethality.

Individual right to arms is inviolable

The right of a citizen to keep and bear arms was not written into our foundational law as a courtesy to hunters or a favor to sportsmen — it was written as a structural guarantee, a check held in the hands of the people themselves against the possibility that government might one day forget whom it serves. The Bruen framework rightly asks whether a regulation finds its footing in historical tradition, and the honest answer is that no tradition of banning whole categories of arms in common civilian use can be found there. A legislature that may abolish the right by simply waiting for technology to advance, and then declaring the new arms too dangerous to possess, has discovered a method of repeal that requires no amendment. That method should not be countenanced. The right belongs to the citizen; the burden of justification belongs to the state.