A new analysis by The Trace of more than 1,600 Second Amendment rulings filed in the wake of Bruen found that, instead of limiting judges’ discretion as conservative justices predicted, the decision has made federal courts even more of a political battleground, where gun laws rise and fall along partisan lines. The Trace’s analysis identified 150 lawsuits seeking to overturn state assault weapons bans, age limits on buying firearms, licensing rules, and other gun restrictions. In the 150 cases — many of which were brought by the National Rifle Association and other gun rights groups — Republican-appointed judges sided with plaintiffs 48 percent of the time. That is four times the rate of Democratic appointees, who did so in 13 percent of the cases they heard. “You’ve got the same Supreme Court decision, yet you’re getting this ideological difference in how the same rule is applied by all these different people,” said Jeremy Fogel, who served as a federal judge in California for 20 years before retiring in 2018. “It undermines trust when people think that judges are just deciding cases based on their policy preferences.”
In 2011, when Brett Kavanaugh was an appeals judge, his 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. Kavanaugh contended that such a test would be “much less subjective,” preventing judges from injecting their personal ideologies. Eleven years later, in June 2022, Kavanaugh and his Republican-appointed allies on the Supreme Court incorporated that test into their decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, reshaping the right to bear arms and setting off a flurry of legal challenges to gun regulations. Bottom of FormJudges appointed by President Donald Trump have ruled against gun restrictions more often than nearly every other president’s appointees, accounting for 29 percent of the rulings in lawsuits striking down gun laws, The Trace found. His judges are behind only former President George W. Bush’s, whose appointees accounted for 48 percent.
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