Judges rarely complain openly about the Supreme Court, for the same reason that most people do not publicly chastise their bosses. Attacking your boss is a good way to ensure that your own work will be discounted — or worse.

So it’s remarkable just how many judges have published opinions criticizing the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen (2022), a decision by all six of the Court’s Republicans that instructs lower court judges on how they should handle Second Amendment cases.

Or, at least, Bruen purports to provide lower courts with this kind of guidance. As one federal judge complained in a 2023 opinion, the “unique test” the Republican justices came up with in Bruen “does not provide lower courts with clear guidance.” Courts, a different federal appellate judge wrote, “are struggling at every stage of the Bruen inquiry.”

Indeed, in her concurring opinion in United States v. Rahimi (2024), the Supreme Court’s only attempt to interpret Bruen since that decision was handed down, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson quoted a dozen different judicial opinions complaining that Bruen simply does not work. One Trump appointee protested Bruen’s “inconsistent and amorphous standard” and warned that it “created mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found”

Briefly, Bruen held that for nearly any gun law to survive a constitutional challenge, “the government must demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” To meet this burden, government lawyers must show that the modern-day gun law they are defending is sufficiently similar to “analogous regulations” that existed when the Constitution was framed.

And just how “analogous” must these long-forgotten laws be? As the dozen judges quoted by Justice Jackson show, no one really knows. In 2020, the federal government alone charged more than 14,000 defendants with firearm-related crimes. Thanks to Bruen, every single one of those cases can descend into a Mad Hatter–like inquiry into how a raven resembles a writing desk.

Which brings us to

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