Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
Oh Lord I do not want to insert myself in this conversation but… I’m curious about the death stats.
Far and away the most common causes of death are disease based - and most are chronic conditions like heart disease or diabetes. You have to get well down the list before things like suicide appear. But suicide appears as a category, not disaggregated by cause (overdose, asphyxiation etc.). The same is true for homicide etc. To get the numbers you reference you’d have to disaggregate the categorical data and then re-aggregate by method.
Do you know of such a data source?