New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen

Majority reasoning

The majority, following Heller and McDonald, held that when the Second Amendment's text covers a person's conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects it, and the government must then prove the regulation matches a historical tradition of firearm regulation—rejecting the means-end scrutiny (intermediate or strict scrutiny) that lower courts had layered on top of history. The Court reasoned that Heller's own methodology relied on text and history, not judicial balancing of costs and benefits, and that judges lack the empirical expertise to weigh such tradeoffs; the Second Amendment itself already represents society's interest-balancing. Reviewing English, colonial, founding-era, antebellum, Reconstruction-era, and territorial history, the majority concluded that governments have not broadly required citizens to show a special need to carry commonly used weapons like handguns in public, aside from a few late-19th-century outlier jurisdictions (mainly two Texas cases and thinly populated Western territories), which it found too isolated, temporary, or unreviewed to establish a national tradition. It responded to the dissent's argument that judges are ill-equipped for extensive historical analysis by noting that legal inquiry is a "refined subset" of historical inquiry guided by evidentiary rules, and that parties—not judges independently—must compile the historical record. The majority also rejected the argument that discovery was needed, saying the resolution turned only on the legal standard requiring a specialized showing, not on factual details of how New York administered the law.

Dissent reasoning

Justice Breyer, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, argued the majority struck down New York's law without allowing any evidentiary record on how the law actually operates, based only on the pleadings. He contended the Court wrongly discarded means-end scrutiny, which considers a state's public-safety interests and a law's effectiveness, arguing that Heller itself invoked scrutiny language ("under any of the standards of scrutiny") and that means-end tests are used throughout constitutional law, including for speech and equal protection. The dissent argued that judges are poorly suited to resolve contested historical questions—citing scholarly disputes over Heller's own historical claims about the English Bill of Rights and the phrase "bear arms"—and that the majority's history-only approach gives lower courts no workable guidance on which historical analogues count. Reviewing seven centuries of English and American laws restricting public carry, the dissent concluded these show a robust, continuous tradition of regulating (and sometimes broadly prohibiting) public carriage of concealable weapons, which the majority dismissed for shifting and inconsistent reasons. The dissent opened with extensive statistics on gun violence, mass shootings, and deaths, arguing legislatures—not courts—are best positioned to balance the benefits and dangers of firearms given the complexity of the problem.