"What's happening now is a fight over what the Second Amendment ultimately means," says Chuck Michel, president and general counsel at the California Rifle & Pistol Association, which is suing the state over newly passed limits on concealed firearms. "This truly is a historic time for Second Amendment jurisprudence."
Bruen has also created sudden, intense interest in research from people such as Brennan Gardner Rivas, an independent scholar who wrote her dissertation on the history of gun regulation in Texas.
"The states and attorneys general who are trying to defend their gun laws from challenges now have to seek out historians to identify analogous historical laws," Rivas says. "They've all found me on their own through Googling me and looking up my publications and things like that."
Rivas, who has consulted on more than a dozen cases since the landmark Bruen decision, says her work is a mixture of analyzing digitized collections of historical state laws, while also seeking out the "dusty archives" that might contain forgotten local or municipal ordinances. She says a prominent example of this was the ban on carrying guns in Tombstone, Ariz. — a ban that sparked the infamous gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881.
"I'm just always floored by how many regulations there were" in early America, Rivas says. "It seems like the more we dig, the more we find."
Super interesting article on how the Bruen ruling has changed how gun safety cases are being handled in the courts.
Also fun reading: https://firearmslaw.duke.edu/repository ... l-gun-laws
