The Justice Department sent a brief to a Mississippi federal judge arguing he does not need to hire a historian to decide whether a contested gun law is in line with the Supreme Court‘s most recent Second Amendment ruling.
The DOJ sent the brief to Judge Carlton Reeves after he wrote a scathing order in October, frustrated over the high court’s summer gun-related opinion. He ordered the parties to brief him on whether he needed outside guidance to understand the fine details of the ruling.
“The justices of the Supreme Court, distinguished as they may be, are not trained historians,” Reeves wrote.
The case before Reeves concerns a federal statute prohibiting felons from possessing firearms, and the summer high court opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen has created confusion over the case for the judge to decide.
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Last term, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote the 6-3 opinion that expanded the scope of the Second Amendment and changed the framework judges must use to review gun regulations, requiring such laws to be “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
In the DOJ’s latest filing, the Biden administration defended the federal statute blocking felons from possessing firearms and urged Reeves’s court not to hire a historian, arguing the government would win the case without such additions.
“Our legal tradition rests in large part on the responsibility of the parties to present materials necessary to support their legal positions,” a federal public defender wrote in the brief.
“The prospect of judges in all 94 federal judicial districts retaining a historian would be an expensive proposition and a departure from the typical reliance on the parties to provide support for their legal positions,” U.S. Attorney Darren LaMarca wrote in a subsequent filing.
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The high court’s summer decision in Bruen sparked the beginning of Democratic-led states’ attempts to pursue new gun control measures that are in accordance with the new precedent established in Thomas’s majority opinion.
Following the June decision, New York lawmakers quickly altered their gun laws but have sparked new litigation efforts from gun rights groups that have found favor in lower federal and state courts to challenge the new laws.
