The Center is hiring! We are looking for a new Executive Director to take over the role from Jake, who will be starting this summer as an Associate Professor of Law at Pepperdine Caruso School of Law. The job description is below and application instructions can be found here: https://bit.ly/3FUJyZJ. We are happy to answer […]
The curious happenings in the bump stock ban case, Aposhian v. Garland, continue. It has now been scheduled for four different Friday conferences, only to be rescheduled days before each time. I posed the question to some experts on Twitter, and some thought it could be either a justice writing a dissent (which normally happens […]
Scholarship on the subject of historical firearm laws has, whether knowingly or not, tended to take certain ideas for granted. Chief among these assumptions is that post-Civil War public carry laws have been the primary vehicle for creating a racially inequitable right to arms. There is also widespread acceptance of the notion that openly carrying […]
One notable development on the docket is that, after the Maryland attorney general waived a response to the petition challenging the state’s assault weapons ban, the Court called for a response. That move indicates at least some justices are interested in the case, and a recent analysis showed that in general a call for response […]
The claim that all gun control is inherently racist is relatively new. The claim grew to prominence in gun rights circles in the 1990s after Robert Cottrol and Raymond Diamond published their seminal 1991 article “The Second Amendment: Toward an Afro-Americanist Reconsideration.” That same year National Rifle Association (NRA) assistant counsel Stefan B. Tahmassebi proclaimed […]
The relationship between citizenship and gun rights continues to vex federal courts.[1] In turn, the answer to whether gun rights are citizen-only rights implicates other core constitutional protections. Accordingly, courts and commentators must critically re-examine the alarming judicial trend towards excluding noncitizens from the ambit of the Second Amendment. The Court’s 2008 District of Columbia […]
In 2012, I published an article examining the interplay between Indians (Indigenous Americans) and guns.[1] That article traced the relationship between Indians – individually and as members of Native Nations – and firearms, stretching from the earliest days of contact between Natives and colonizers, up to present day. The complex historical and legal dynamics discussed […]
Forty-four reasons come to mind Why a motherfuckin’ brother is hard to find He been walkin’ on the streets and fuckin’ with mine Stupid punk can’t fuck with a mastermind See, I never take a step on a Compton block Or L.A. without the AK ready to pop ‘Cause them punk motherfuckers in black and […]
In its order list this week, the Supreme Court denied cert in P.Z. and Hatch. Although P.Z. seemed like quite a long shot to me, Hatch seemed to at least implicate issues the Court is adjudicating in Bruen, so if the Court held the case that wouldn’t be surprising. The case challenged a Minnesota law […]
In the past decade, three high-profile trials have revolved around a seemingly straightforward question: can a person take a gun to a location where they are reasonably sure that there will be volatility and even violence, introduce that firearm into a fight, shoot someone in the course of that fight, and then claim self-defense because […]
