We Analyzed Every Gun Case Since <em>Bruen.</em> The Result Is Horrifying.

This story was published in partnership with the Trace , a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletter here .

On Jan. 29, in a federal courtroom in Mississippi, US District Judge Carlton Reeves delivered a ruling that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: He found the decades-old federal ban on machine guns unconstitutional.

At the center of the case was a firearm that seemed designed to provoke: an AR-15-style rifle named the “NFA Whore, Whore-16.” It had a switch that allowed its user to select between three modes of fire: “MARY” for safe, “SLUT” for semiautomatic, and “WHORE” for fully automatic machine gun. The defendant was also accused of illegally possessing 20 Glock “switches ”—devices that convert pistols to automatic fire—and more than 400 rounds of ammunition.

But Reeves made clear that his decision had little to do with the weapon's offensive branding or the intensifying public safety threat posed by automatic weapons. He said his hands were tied by the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen , which upended Second Amendment law. Bruen mandated that modern gun regulations align with historical firearms regulations. Suddenly, judges were less arbiters of modern safety and more reluctant antiquarians, tasked with finding 18 ^th - or 19 ^th -century parallels for today's gun laws.

While the Justice Department is appealing Reeves' ruling, it is among a growing number of decisions striking down gun laws in the post- Bruen era. At least three rulings in the past year have invalidated federal restrictions on machine guns, once considered settled law. Bruen has also imperiled concealed carry laws, assault weapons bans, and a host of other gun restrictions. A Trace analysis of more than 2,000 challenges to gun laws since Bruen found that a case's outcome now hinges on conflicting interpretations of America's complex and often uncomfortable past. As judges, lawyers, and historians argue over what history counts and what it means, gun rights groups have capitalized on the confusion—with sweeping consequences for public safety.

President Donald Trump's return to the White House has increased the chances of more gun restrictions being tossed out. The president has ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to reassess how the Justice Department handles legal challenges to federal gun laws—a move that could lead the administration to stop defending them altogether. In April, the Justice Department asked a court for more time to decide whether it would defend the ban on gun possession by illegal drug users. More recently, the department settled a lawsuit over forced-reset triggers, in the process allowing the sale of aftermarket devices that boost a semiautomatic rifle's rate of fire.

Many judges have openly admitted they're not equipped to evaluate whether centuries-old statutes match modern-day restrictions. Eric Segall, a constitutional law professor at Georgia State University College of Law, said judges' lack of expertise is evident in their rulings. “There are a thousand decisions going in all directions because history is not reliable in the hands of qualified historians, much less in the hands of unqualified historians,” Segall said. “None of them should be doing history in any meaningful sense of the word.”

Meanwhile, Bruen ’s real-world effects are becoming increasingly stark. In January, the ^5th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against a federal age restriction on handgun sales, allowing gun stores in Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi to sell pistols to teenagers with little fear of prosecution.

At least two other appeals courts have thrown out age restrictions on guns in the past year. On April 21, the Supreme Court refused to hear a case concerning Minnesota's ban on 18- to 20-year-olds obtaining permits to carry concealed handguns in public. The move let stand an appeals court decision striking down the ban. Within days, the sheriff in Minnesota's most populous county, home to Minneapolis, opened concealed carry permit applications to 18-year-olds.

Other courts have upheld similar laws. A ^10th Circuit panel backed a Colorado age restriction last November, and earlier this year, the ^11th Circuit upheld Florida's ban on gun sales to people under 21.

In Reeves' courtroom, prosecutors argued that machine guns are not constitutionally protected because they are “dangerous and unusual.” Reeves, concluding that Bruen had rendered such thinking “obsolete,” ruled that prosecutors had failed to present a convincing historical analogue from the Founding era to justify banning the defendant from possessing a machine gun in his home. But in dismissing the charge, Reeves didn't hold back from criticizing the selective and superficial use of historical evidence under Bruen .

“The ultimate irony is that the version of history endorsed in these (and other) decisions has itself been deemed untrustworthy by actual historians,” he wrote. “The experts don’t think lawyers and judges have gotten it right.”

When deciding whether a gun law passes muster under Bruen , judges must choose which historical period to compare it to. Is it the late ^18th century, when the Second Amendment was ratified? Or the post–Civil War period, when the Bill of Rights was applied to the states? The Supreme Court offered little advice, and while both lower courts have cited, most judges have prioritized the Founding era.

Gun rights groups frequently call on courts to exclude other time periods. That's because there were fewer regulations—at least regulations written down as statute—compared to the latter half of the 1800s, leaving fewer historical analogues to pick from. Focusing on the Founding era also ignores crucial legal developments in the intervening decades. Saul Cornell, a Fordham University history professor who has served as an expert in dozens of post- Bruen gun cases, said more people go through Times Square each day in 2025 than lived in the state of New York in 1791, the year the Second Amendment was ratified. “It's not surprising they weren't much concerned about gun violence in the ^18th century,” he said.

The ^19th century, on the other hand, marked a pivotal transformation in firearms technology, with the advent of guns that let users reliably fire multiple rounds without reloading and more affordable, dependable, and concealable pistols, famously exemplified by Samuel Colt's revolvers. The proliferation of these guns in American life, particularly from the 1830s onward, coincided with a rise in social problems and interpersonal violence. In response, states and localities enacted tougher regulations .

“There is a tradition of firearms regulation in the United States,” said Brian DeLay, a University of California, Berkeley, historian who has also been an expert witness in post- Bruen cases. “And its basic dynamic is that when there is technological change that is robust and practical enough to actually generate social consequences, it is met with regulation. It happens over and over and over again.”

Still, Bruen requires courts to compare regulations designed for a time of agrarian communities and muzzle-loading muskets to laws addressing densely populated metropolises and semiautomatic rifles. “The founders did not inhabit a world where a disgruntled 18-year-old could go and kill a couple dozen people in six or seven minutes,” DeLay said.

Beyond the era, judges must also decide what kinds of historical sources should carry weight. Are only state legislative statutes relevant? What about common law practices, local ordinances, and territorial laws? In upholding the gun ban on people convicted of felonies, one federal judge in Illinois pointed to 18 ^th -century manuals that instructed constables to sixteen weapons from the “dangerous” or “disaffected.” Even though those manuals predate the Second Amendment—and weren't written down as statute—the judge concluded that they reflect a longstanding principle of keeping guns away from people the government considered untrustworthy.

For lawyers and researchers, identifying and verifying sources is difficult and time-consuming, requiring expertise and access to expensive legal databases that, while extensive, don't necessarily include all of the historical state statutes. As a result, governments defending gun laws are sometimes forced to start from scratch, hiring historians to build records on issues that haven't been deeply researched. “There's tons of stuff that we haven't figured out yet,” DeLay said.

Governments that forego hiring historians often end up relying on statutes born of bias. In an Illinois case in 2025, prosecutors defending the gun ban on people with felony convictions pointed to Founding era laws disarming loyalty Catholics who refused oaths, Colonial and Antebellum statutes barring enslaved and free Black people from owning guns, and 18 ^th -century punishments for felonies that ranged from estate forfeiture to execution.

“Undoubtedly, today the disarmament of religious minorities would be understood as abhorrent, reprehensible, and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause—as would the categorical disarmament of Blacks and Native Americans, another pervasive practice in our country's historical tradition,” the prosecutors wrote. “But, considered solely for the limited purpose of the historical inquiry required by Bruen , these laws nevertheless 'reveal conclusively the scope of governmental power that was understood to exist at the time the Second Amendment was adopted.' ”

The Trace's review of post- Bruen challenges found more than 1,000 rulings in which judges compared a modern gun law to statutes from the past. Of those, nearly a third—more than 300—featured federal, state, and local governments citing discriminatory statutes. (The other cases we reviewed didn't include a historical analysis because the judges relied on precedent to make their decisions or otherwise determined that an analysis was unnecessary.)

Governments that rely on discriminatory statutes are often successful. In 2023, a US district judge in Illinois, Franklin Valderrama, upheld the gun ban on people with felony convictions even as he acknowledged the moral discomfort he felt by relying on such invidious parallels. “As other district courts have pointed out, many of the historical laws cited by the Government are deplorable and certainly would not survive a constitutional challenge today,” he wrote. “But, under Bruen , courts must examine historical analogues, and 'laws disarming enslaved people, religious minorities, and Native Americans—how ever repulsive to modern sensibilities—fit that bill.' ”