Prof. Megan Walsh Quoted in Slate About How Bruen Has Shaped Gun Control Rulings Along Partisan Lines

In 2011, a federal appeals court voted 2–1 to uphold Washington, D.C.’s assault weapons ban. The lone dissent came from then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh, who argued that a gun restriction could only be constitutional if it fit with the nation’s history and tradition of gun regulation. Such a test, he wrote, would be “much less subjective,” preventing judges from injecting their personal ideologies. But a new analysis of more than 1,600 Second Amendment rulings filed in the wake of Bruen found that, instead of limiting judges’ discretion as Kavanaugh and the other conservative justices predicted, the decision has made federal courts even more of a political battleground, where gun laws rise and fall along partisan lines. Professor Megan Walsh, director of the Gun Violence Prevention Clinic, said, “There just aren’t a lot of guardrails with Bruen, and it becomes a kind of choose-your-own-adventure situation where judges can decide how to answer very open questions. Bruen provides a wide enough lane to allow a judge to let their internal determinations about the way that they want the result to go to lead the analysis.”