Hardly a day or a week goes by without another mass shooting. But the opinion authored by Thomas (and joined by the other five extreme right-wing justices) in New York Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022) has made most commons (sic) sense gun control regulations illegal and will lead to more people being killed and maimed by weapons of war that have no business in the hands of civilians. It also imposed a cramped, extremist version of right-wing “originalism” on Supreme Court interpretation.

As I recently wrote, in only the past year, lower federal courts have quickly followed the precedent of Thomas’s Bruen opinion to hold that:

“A spousal abuser has a constitutional right to gun ownership, since “Our ancestors who wrote the laws [i.e white men] would never have accepted such restrictions.” (After all, wife beating was pretty socially acceptable in 1791 and women were then subordinate to their husbands.)”