James Gould v. United States

Whether permanent disarmament under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g)(4), based solely upon prior temporary involuntary commitment to a mental institution (as opposed to being a “mental defective” – i.e. during a current episode of mental illness, or incident to an adjudication of incompetence, or insanity), facially violates the Second Amendment under New York Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1, 142 S. Ct. 2111 (2022).

Whether for purposes of establishing a “relevantly similar” historical analogue under Bruen’s step two, there are objective limits on the scope of “how” and “why” the compared regulations burden the Second Amendment right – such that categorial disarmament using a completely open-ended and overbroad “dangerousness” principle is entirely too generalized to use as part of Bruen’s analogical analysis. -1-