Quivadas Quadell-Lee Gaines v. United States

Under New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), a firearm regulation survives the Second Amendment only if the government proves that it is “consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Whether a historical law counts toward that showing depends on whether it is “relevantly similar” to the modern one, and what counts as relevantly similar depends on the metric a court selects. Bruen supplied two metrics: how and why a regulation burdens the right. It did not supply a third, because it had no occasion to. New York enacted the law at issue there, and the historical laws to which it was compared were enacted by colonies, States, and territories. The identity of the regulating sovereign was constant across the comparison, and so it dropped out. It does not drop out in a federal prosecution. Every case under 18 U.S.C. § 922(g) pits a federal statute against a historical record made by somebody else. There was no federal civilian firearms prohibition of any kind until the twentieth century, and no federal status-based possession ban until 1968. The question presented is: Whether the identity of the sovereign that enacted a historical firearm regulation is part of Bruen’s “relevantly similar” inquiry, so that a federal firearm prohibition must be justified by a federal historical tradition rather than by the regulatory history of the colonies, the States, and their political subdivisions.