Why gun control advocates seem to ignore Bruen decision

AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File

Earlier today, I wrote about a legal site that seemed to act as if the Bruen decision wasn’t a thing. A week or two back, Cam covered a federal court upholding a magazine ban. Again, it was as if the Bruen decision simply never happened.

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That’s a big problem.

After all, the Supreme Court issued a ruling on guns and gun control. There really wasn’t a great deal of ambiguity to it. There was room for nuance–just what was the exact timeframe a law needed to exist to be considered as the time of the founding and just what kind of regulation was close enough to matter–but it was clear what hurdles people needed to attempt to clear.

And yet, here we are.

Writing over at Guns Magazine, David Workman has a take worth reading.

The Bruen ruling was devastating to the gun control movement. It removed the ability of anti-gun state governments and bureaucrats to arbitrarily deny citizens their right to bear arms by requiring a concealed carry permit/license applicant to provide “good cause” why he or she should get a license. It struck down a century-old mandate in New York, which also affected neighboring New Jersey, nearby Maryland, distant California, even farther-away Hawaii and a couple of other states.
Keep this in perspective: These laws were not just suddenly unconstitutional; they’ve been violating the Second Amendment for generations and everybody knows it.

But to show how self-righteous and stubborn they can be, legislatures in Albany, Newark and Sacramento not only scrambled to adopt new gun laws, they went out of their way to make the laws worse. Without saying so, those state lawmakers told the Supreme Court to essentially “stick it,” and went about their crusade to crush the rights of law-abiding constituents.

Bluntly put, gun control proponents don’t care what the high court said and they will continue their childish tantrum until the legal and political rug is pulled from beneath them. Thanks to support from equally self-righteous wealthy elites, who think they can run our lives better than we can, this fight might take a while.

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Workman notes that the anti-gun media presents challenges as tests of the ruling rather than them being tests of the Constitution itself, which is absolutely true.

The truth, though, is that we can complain about it or we can do something about it.

Our media isn’t suddenly going to become pro-gun or even neutral on the issue. Journalists have long since abandoned any pretense of neutrality. They’re not where we’re going to make any inroads.

But we need to gear up for a fight, as Workman argues. That fight is going to be in the legislatures throughout this country but we also need to start winning hearts and minds.

The media won’t give us the outlets, but we can do it the old-fashioned way. We can talk to our friends and neighbors. We can start changing people’s thinking about guns through open, frank discussions but not by getting worked up and angry.

When public opinion changes, the efforts of lawmakers will change as well.

While we won’t give up our rights because of polling data, we will see people give up their efforts to restrict those rights because of it.

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