Such is the view of Justice Thomas underlying his majority opinion in the case that has crushed gun restrictions, and the view dismantled in the dissent by Justice Breyer.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/24/gun-ruling-flawed-breyer-dissent/
From the above cited column :
“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed more than a century ago. The current Supreme Court, with its six-justice conservative majority, disagrees. Its ruling dramatically expanding gun rights spurns both logic and experience for the phony comfort of history.
The conservative justices may have convinced themselves that looking at gun rights through the lens of history — whether the gun regulation at issue is consistent with the kind of restrictions that were in place when the Constitution was written or amended — prevents courts from substituting their own policy preferences for clear constitutional commands. This is self-serving rubbish, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer demonstrates in his dissenting opinion, albeit in more polite terms...
With the New York ruling, the court reduced judges’ role to a single task: determining whether “the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
But as Breyer persuasively argues, the history of gun regulation is conflicting, elusive and fundamentally inadequate to the task of judging the legality of present-day rules. “How can we expect laws and cases that are over a century old to dictate the legality of regulations targeting ‘ghost guns' constructed with the aid of a three-dimensional printer?” Breyer asks. “Or modern laws requiring all gun shops to offer smart guns, which can only be fired by authorized users? Or laws imposing additional criminal penalties for the use of bullets capable of piercing body armor?”
You would not know, from reading (the)...majority opinion, that the nation was mired in an epidemic of gun violence or traumatized by mass shootings of schoolchildren and grocery-shoppers. Breyer leads with that — “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms,” his opening sentence reads — and keeps going, for several gruesome pages of statistics on gun violence.
This recitation did not sit well with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote a separate, rather ill-tempered concurrence devoted entirely to rebutting Breyer’s dissent. “It is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served by most of the dissent’s lengthy introductory section,” he writes.
Is it? For Breyer, judges do not operate solely in the arid realm of text and history, but in the arena of practical consequences, for public safety but also for democratic values. Answering Alito directly, he says his goal was to demonstrate that the “question of firearm regulation presents a complex problem—one that should be solved by legislatures rather than courts."
He continues to write, “The primary difference between the Court’s view and mine is that I believe the [Second] Amendment allows States to take account of the serious problems posed by gun violence that I have just described.”
Logic and experience, under the majority’s view, yield to what Breyer described as a “rigid history-only approach.” For Breyer, the law is a flexible instrument, one that should be used to optimize democratic governance. His Bruen dissent will stand as a rebuke to the majority’s cramped view, and a reminder of what the court will lose with his retirement."
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/06/24/gun-ruling-flawed-breyer-dissent/
From the above cited column :
“The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience,” Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. observed more than a century ago. The current Supreme Court, with its six-justice conservative majority, disagrees. Its ruling dramatically expanding gun rights spurns both logic and experience for the phony comfort of history.
The conservative justices may have convinced themselves that looking at gun rights through the lens of history — whether the gun regulation at issue is consistent with the kind of restrictions that were in place when the Constitution was written or amended — prevents courts from substituting their own policy preferences for clear constitutional commands. This is self-serving rubbish, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer demonstrates in his dissenting opinion, albeit in more polite terms...
With the New York ruling, the court reduced judges’ role to a single task: determining whether “the regulation is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”
But as Breyer persuasively argues, the history of gun regulation is conflicting, elusive and fundamentally inadequate to the task of judging the legality of present-day rules. “How can we expect laws and cases that are over a century old to dictate the legality of regulations targeting ‘ghost guns' constructed with the aid of a three-dimensional printer?” Breyer asks. “Or modern laws requiring all gun shops to offer smart guns, which can only be fired by authorized users? Or laws imposing additional criminal penalties for the use of bullets capable of piercing body armor?”
You would not know, from reading (the)...majority opinion, that the nation was mired in an epidemic of gun violence or traumatized by mass shootings of schoolchildren and grocery-shoppers. Breyer leads with that — “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms,” his opening sentence reads — and keeps going, for several gruesome pages of statistics on gun violence.
This recitation did not sit well with Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who wrote a separate, rather ill-tempered concurrence devoted entirely to rebutting Breyer’s dissent. “It is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served by most of the dissent’s lengthy introductory section,” he writes.
Is it? For Breyer, judges do not operate solely in the arid realm of text and history, but in the arena of practical consequences, for public safety but also for democratic values. Answering Alito directly, he says his goal was to demonstrate that the “question of firearm regulation presents a complex problem—one that should be solved by legislatures rather than courts."
He continues to write, “The primary difference between the Court’s view and mine is that I believe the [Second] Amendment allows States to take account of the serious problems posed by gun violence that I have just described.”
Logic and experience, under the majority’s view, yield to what Breyer described as a “rigid history-only approach.” For Breyer, the law is a flexible instrument, one that should be used to optimize democratic governance. His Bruen dissent will stand as a rebuke to the majority’s cramped view, and a reminder of what the court will lose with his retirement."
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