After Bruen and Rahimi: The Gun Cases Still Being Tried in the Lower Courts

Gun litigation after the Supreme Court’s recent Second Amendment terms is no longer a single landmark case. It is a map of follow-on fights: who may carry, where they may carry, which sensitive places survive Bruen-style analogical reasoning, and how domestic-violence and other prohibitors apply after Rahimi.

History and tradition, week after week

September 2026 finds those questions in district courts and courts of appeals rather than in a single argued Supreme Court caption. That does not make them small. A permitting regime that is lawful in one circuit can be enjoined in the next. Licensed carriers, city governments, and police departments are writing policies on top of opinions that still cite 1791 and 1868 as if those years were last Tuesday.

The doctrinal test remains history-and-tradition. Judges who liked that test in theory have discovered that colonial surety laws and Reconstruction militia statutes do not answer whether a modern subway platform is a sensitive place. The result is an unusually empirical kind of originalism: whoever finds the better analogue wins the preliminary injunction.

Ordinary stakes

For Court Magazine readers the human stakes are ordinary. A person with a protective order wants to know if the person subject to that order may keep a handgun. A commuter wants to know whether the car or the station is the line. A state legislature wants to know whether last session’s sensitive-places list will survive the next cert petition.

Rahimi kept the idea that some people may be disarmed after a judicial finding of dangerousness. It did not write a catalog. Every new disqualifier — a temporary order, a nonviolent felony, a marijuana registry card — is now an as-applied lawsuit waiting for a plaintiff. Cities that respond by drawing larger sensitive-place maps will meet Bruen’s analogue demand on the next motion calendar.

What to watch

Watch three things. First, any new Supreme Court grant that picks a sensitive-place or permitting case as a vehicle. Second, how lower courts treat analogical reasoning when the Founding-era record is silent. Third, whether Congress or states answer with new statutory prohibitors that force the Court back to Rahimi’s as-applied logic. The amendment is not a slogan. It is a constraint that now generates weekly published opinions.