The Supreme Court Is a Pro-Gun Activist Group - Balls and Strikes [View all]

[In It to Win It]

https://ballsandstrikes.org/scotus/wolford-v-lopez-the-supreme-court-is-a-pro-gun-activist-group/

Whenever the Supreme Court’s six-justice conservative supermajority issues a high-stakes decision, the majority opinion’s author always strains to make one point clear: that all they are doing is faithfully interpreting the Constitution, and that they are not (and would never) purposefully warp its meaning to further their policy agenda.

Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion in Wolford v. Lopez is no different. In Wolford, which the Court decided on Thursday, the six conservatives voted to strike down a Hawaii law that requires people to obtain consent from owners of private property—shops, restaurants, and so on—before bringing guns on the premises. This restriction, Alito wrote, is inconsistent with the “historical” understanding of the right the Framers designed the Second Amendment to protect. Scrupulous fidelity to the norms of that era, he continued, is essential in order to avoid what is, in his mind, the single worst thing a modern court can do: engage in an “interest-balancing inquiry” that “empowers” judges to rewrite the Constitution as they see fit.

The premise here—that hyper-focusing on the “history and tradition” of American firearms regulation is the correct way to Do Law, Not Politics—has always been a lie. But it is an especially obvious lie today, when, just four years after creating a new test for deciding Second Amendment cases, the conservatives have (again) reimagined it to strike down (another) gun safety law enacted by the people’s elected representatives to keep their constituents safe.

What Wolford makes clear, wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson in a dissent joined by the other two liberals, is that “the Court’s objective is protecting guns, not consistently preserving any rule of law.” The history-and-tradition approach, she concluded, is a “free-for-all” system that allows judges to “thwart the will of legislatures by privileging access to firearms above all else.”

A throughline of Sam Alito's jurisprudence is that the law protects conservatives from getting their feelings hurt. Here, he says Hawaii's gun licensing law is unconstitutional because it forces business owners who are fine with guns to risk "alienating other customers." Straight-up policy choice.

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2026-06-25T15:56:18.662Z

Genuinely funny for Alito to end his opinion in this case by (1) talking about how important it is to protect the rights of Black people and (2) footnoting to Eric Foner's "The Second Founding," a book I would bet a substantial sum that Alito has not and will never read

— Jay Willis (@jaywillis.net) 2026-06-25T16:05:24.609Z