Editorial: Line of fire: Judicial havoc is no way to run gun policy

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court ruling that had struck down a Pennsylvania law barring people under 21 from carrying firearms openly during declared states of emergency. It’s hard to really celebrate this as a victory given how basic common sense it is — that judges had found it proper to allow 18-year-olds to walk around with drawn firearms during emergencies strains understanding.

Yet it’s still a small win that was tempered almost immediately by Buffalo Federal Judge John Sinatra who struck down a part of New York State’s 2022 gun law that had made it illegal to concealed-carry firearms into private property like stores and restaurants unless those locations affirmatively indicated they accepted such weapons. Once more, a judge has stepped in to toss uncertainty into the already dangerous panorama of U.S. gun culture and regulation.

One thing all this back-and-forth highlights is that it doesn’t make much sense to run gun control policy in a way that is constantly subject to reinterpretation at the whim of the courts. In this case, the Supreme Court made the right call; in others, it has gone the opposite way, such as with the 2022 ruling against longtime New York gun limits, which itself precipitated the concealed carry gun laws that Sinatra just overturned.

The justices then made a nonsensical call in deciding bump stocks — whose very design and sole purpose is devoted to making semi-automatic weapons fire automatically — did not run afoul of a federal law banning automatic weapons.

It seems thus far like the Supremes might make the right choice in the so-called ghost gun case, where they are effectively considering the question of whether a gun sold disassembled is still a gun for purposes of required background checks and serialization. Whatever the decision, the fact remains that this is not a particularly sensical way to approach a crucial policy area, with lawmakers, judges, regulators and gun manufacturers and sellers all playing a kind of whack-a-mole.

Congress passes an anti-machine gun law, manufacturers develop a modification to make semi-auto rifles into effective machine guns, regulators reinterpret the law to ban that, judges strike it down, and meanwhile tens of thousands of people a year are killed by gunfire in the United States. Even if the court now sides against the ghost guns, there will already have been a vast number created, with many making their way to crime scenes — the ATF reported 19,000 such guns recovered in 2021 alone.

This is made possible by how wishy-washy our gun controls have become in general, with the Supreme Court itself having opened the door with its expansive views on the Second Amendment, far beyond what had been historically understood to be that 18th century provision’s meaning. The courts must stop this activist meddling and let legislators institute gun reforms with real teeth, with the understanding that gun nuts won’t be able to just run to the courts to pry open every possible loophole.

The evidence has long been in that, while issues like access to mental health services have an impact, it’s the access to guns that drives our sky-high rates of suicides, murders and mass shootings with firearms. Every move to muddy the waters or loosen restrictions means the deaths keep piling up.

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