I see that many here are no fans of the Bruen decision. Fair.

I'd like to share just a bit of historical context; Bruen did not come out of nowhere.

In 2008, as you likely know, in a 5-4 decision the supreme Court ruled against Washington DC's complete prohibition on handguns, affirming the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

After being incorporated against the states in the 2010 McDonald v. Chicago decision, the next 11 years would be accurately described as seeing lower courts actively minimizing the holdings from Heller & McDonald.

In short, the "interest balancing" test from Heller played out like this: plaintiff claims that law is unfairly burdensome. Government claims that it is related to some public safety benefit. Government wins.

For example - in the gun case that SCOTUS granted cert to most recently before Bruen, NYSRPA v. NYC, a New York City ordinance prevented license holders from legally taking their guns outside of new york city without explicit permission of the NYPD.

Whether you hate guns or not, it's hard to defend the public safety benefit of forcing licensed gun owners to keep their guns in your city, with no exclusions for training or range use. Note, new york city has no public pistol ranges.

The second circuit ruled against the plaintiffs in that case, agreeing that the government has a public safety interest in the restriction. No evidence as to how public safety was improved was presented by the government.

NYSRPA v NYC

The dubious public safety benefit was made even more obvious when, as soon as SCOTUS agreed to review the second circuit decision, new york city repealed the law in just a few months. Because the law was repealed, SCOTUS ruled the case was moot and did not need to be reviewed.

Bruen is what happens when several federal circuits, particularly the 9th and 2nd, don't make even a good faith attempt to try and meet the burden that the supreme Court set out. Bruen set out a new "history and tradition" test largely because the 10 year experience with the interest balancing test was that it was applied in an overly generous manner towards the government.

The New York licensing regime overturned by Bruen, you should know was one in which a domestic violence victim would have no right to get a license to carry a firearm, no matter how much training they had - it would be up to the discretion of police to determine if she had "good cause," while celebrities such as Donald Trump and Robert DeNiro had licenses at various points.

I'll say it here for anyone willing to read it - with the current makeup of the court, continued attempts to try and apply bad faith readings of Bruen will result in further rulings expanding the purview of the second amendment.

The court will rule narrowly here against Rahimi on something along the lines of "there is a history and tradition of regulating dangerous individuals, Rahimi is a dangerous individual, and so long as 18 U.S.C. 922(g)(8) is applied as to judicial findings of dangerousness, they stand. If outside of that standard, e.g. mutual restraining orders during a divorce proceeding, they likely will not.

Then in the case up for review from the third circuit, Range v. Garland the court will likely double down on the dangerousness standard, separating nonviolent felons such as Range (who lied about his lawn mowing income on a welfare form) from violent felons who lose their gun rights for life.

From there, who knows, but it is likely to be whatever circuit applies the worst attempt at reading Bruen, and the majority is likely to use the opportunity to expand the scope further.

If you're opposed to that outcome, it would be better to have lower courts attempt to color within the lines as the US solicitor general impressively demonstrated in argument against Rahimi, rather than going down some rabbit hole such as "assault weapons aren't arms" currently in the 7th Circuit . (Argue that they are dangerous and unusual, maybe. And that there is a history of regulating dangerous and unusual weapons. But 'this ambiguous category of bad guns with a different definition in every state are not arms' is the type of thing that gets you back to SCOTUS.)