Free “2023 Supplement” for “Firearms Law and the Second Amendment”
If you want to know what’s been happening with proper to arms litigation up to now two years, you are in luck. Printed just a few weeks in the past is the 2023 Complement to Firearms Regulation and the Second Modification: Regulation, Rights, and Coverage, coauthored by me and Nicholas Johnson (Fordham), George Mocsary (Wyoming, Director of the Firearms Analysis Middle), Gregory Wallace (Campbell), and Donald Kilmer (Lincoln). In 330 pages, the complement brings you updated on the authorized developments on the precise to arms in 2022 and 2023.
The third version of that textbook was revealed in late 2021. At 1,400 pages and $275, it is a cut price when calculated on price per phrase. However the complement is completely free, even if you happen to did not purchase the primary textbook.
After all, the complement examines in depth the U.S. Supreme Courtroom’s monumental Bruen resolution from June 2022. That case affirmed the precise to bear arms in public for lawful self-defense. Extra broadly, Bruen instructed decrease courts to determine Second Modification circumstances the best way that Courtroom had determined District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008: primarily based on the unique which means of the Second Modification, slightly than on judges’ private evaluations of the prices and advantages of gun management. The 2023 Complement catalogues the profusion of circumstances difficult many various legal guidelines on the bottom that they’re opposite to the Second Modification’s unique which means.
Though Firearms Regulation and the Second Modification and its 2023 Complement have been created to be used in superior legislation faculty programs, they’re additionally a treatise meant to be helpful to courts, practitioners, and laypersons. That’s the reason the textbook has been cited in 5 U.S. Circuit Courtroom of Appeals opinions (together with by then-Choose Kavanaugh), by the Illinois Supreme Courtroom, and 5 different circumstances from decrease courts. The textbook has been cited in 91 briefs within the Westlaw database, together with by Everytown for Gun Security, and twice this August in United States authorities briefs within the Circuit Courts of Appeals.
Among the many many subjects within the 2023 Complement are firearm bans aimed toward younger adults; numerous classes of prohibited individuals below federal legislation (comparable to marijuana customers); new federal ATF rules towards pistol braces and different gadgets; the incompetently-drafted 2022 congressional Bipartisan Safer Communities Act; litigation of some state governments’ “huge resistance” to accepting the precise to licensed hid carry; and worldwide developments in Canada and elsewhere.
Beginning with the primary version of Firearms Regulation in 2012, the textbook has been a cyclopedia of the authorized historical past of the precise to arms, together with the broader social and technological context. That continues with the 2023 Complement; the ultimate part of the complement is an in depth rationalization of the evolution of firearms know-how: particularly, how the sorts of weapons—comparable to breechloading repeaters—that within the 1500s have been solely obtainable to folks like King Henry VIII grew to become inexpensive for the 1800s to the typical American.
As Dr. Seuss noticed, “The extra that you simply learn the extra issues you’ll know.” So if you wish to know extra issues, I invite you to learn the 2023 Complement to Firearms Regulation and the Second Modification.
[This post will be cross-posted at the Firearms Research Center Forum, the weblog of the University of Wyoming’s new Firearms Research Center. I am a Senior Fellow at the Center. Contributors to the FRC Forum include “pro-gun” writers, such as me, and also gun control advocates such as law professors Dru Stevenson (South Texas) and Megan Walsh (Minnesota).]
