Guns, Analogies, and Constitutional Interpretation Across Centuries

In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court acknowledged the difficulties in applying its constitutional originalism to the question of firearms regulation. After all, the fully automatic assault rifles whose sale, possession, and use lie at the center of many contemporary debates about gun control and the Second Amendment simply did not exist in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified. Nor did they exist in 1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment, the vehicle for applying the Second Amendment to the states, was added to the Constitution. The firearms that existed in 1791 were largely the heavy, slow, cumbersome, and wildly inaccurate single-shot muskets that made up the arsenals on both sides in the Revolutionary War. And the “arms” envisaged in 1868 would have been predominantly the flintlock muzzle-loading long rifles of the Civil War. Even the Colt revolvers of the so-called Wild West were still at the time of the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment using black powder (as opposed to modern gunpowder)—weapons that were almost unimaginably slower and less accurate than today’s handguns and automatic or even semiautomatic rifles. The Bruen Court recognized the chasm between the arms that existed at the time of the original document and those whose regulation are at issue now. And it recognized an equally large chasm between the regulatory approaches to those arms in earlier times and the regulatory approaches being proposed and considered today. Yet the Bruen 6–3 majority, with its opinion written by Justice Thomas, was nevertheless committed to an originalist methodology. Acknowledging the difficulty of applying an originalist approach across such a long temporal gap, Justice Thomas’s opinion in Bruen relied on the simultaneously empowering yet constraining notion of “reasoning by analogy.” The judicial task, Justice Thomas offered, was to identify “not a historical twin” but a “well-established and representative historical analogue.”