‘The Second Amendment Is Not Unlimited,’ Brett Kavanaugh Stresses in SCOTUS Gun Case

“Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in District of Columbia v. Heller, his 2008 opinion recognizing an individual right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense purposes. “Nothing in our opinion,” Scalia wrote, “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”

Justice Brett Kavanaugh re-upped that language from Scalia today while signing on to Justice Clarence Thomas’ majority opinion in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, in which Thomas held that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

Kavanaugh agreed with Thomas about that. But Kavanaugh also wrote separately, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts, “to underscore two important points about the limits of the Court’s decision.”

First, Kavanaugh stressed, the constitutional problem with New York’s licensing scheme for carrying handguns in public was that “it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials a