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Update: The Supreme Court’s Hemani Decision Just Proved the Gun-Anarchy Point [1]

['Ade', 'Chitown Kev', 'Belinda Ridgewood', 'Thom Hartmann']

Date: 2026-06-18  

Republicans call their position “freedom.” Democrats should call it what it is: gun anarchy. A serious Second Amendment politics starts in the middle — with regulation, guardrails, and public order

The Supreme Court’s new decision in United States v. Hemani is another reminder that the Second Amendment debate is no longer just about gun policy. It is about whether modern public-safety laws must survive a historical-analogy test built for a different century.

In yesterday’s story, I argued that Republicans and the Court have detached the Second Amendment from its “well regulated” core and pushed the country toward a nationalized rule of gun anarchy. Today’s ruling does not weaken that argument. It sharpens it.

Yesterday’s story was Republicans and the Supreme Court Are Imposing Gun Anarchy as “Rights.” Democrats Should Say So Now—Before the Midterms.

Today, the Court held that the government could not prosecute Ali Hemani under the federal law barring unlawful users of controlled substances from possessing firearms, where the government relied solely on his admitted marijuana use “about every other day” and did not claim he was addicted, had misused the gun, or had posed a danger to himself or others.

The ruling is narrow. The Court says it is not deciding whether Congress may disarm addicts, people who are presently intoxicated, felons, or drug users shown through individualized proof to be dangerous. But the larger pattern remains dangerous: modern safety laws are still being forced through a historical filter that asks whether today’s public-safety rules can be analogized to laws from a radically different society.

That is the same problem I warned about.

Modern safety laws are dragged through a historical keyhole.

Democratic judgment is subordinated to judicial historical reconstruction.

The zone of legislative authority keeps shrinking while the zone of constitutionally protected gun possession keeps expanding.

The Court says the government may not simply declare a whole category of people dangerous and disarm them by fiat. Fair enough. But that only proves the deeper point: a serious Second Amendment doctrine would ask whether a law is reasonably tailored to real public danger today, not whether lawyers can find a sufficiently similar historical analogue from the era of habitual-drunkard laws and surety bonds.

This is not judicial humility. It is a constitutional system that makes modern safety policy answer to antique categories.

That is the insanity of the test. If judges cannot find the right 18th- or 19th-century analogue for disarming habitual drunkards, modern lawmakers are told they may not regulate modern gun risks in a modern society. Because the past did not write the exact rule in the exact form today’s danger requires, the present gets handcuffed. That is not constitutional fidelity. It is judicial ideology wearing an antique costume.

And it reinforces the thesis of my story: Democrats should stop accepting the language of “gun rights” when the practical result is a Court-engineered narrowing of democratic power to regulate guns. The frame is not “control vs. rights.” It is public order vs. gun anarchy.

Democrats should say so now, because the Court is not done.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2026/6/18/800057395/community/update-the-supreme-court-just-proved-the-gun-anarchy-point/

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