Hundreds of cities — and even some states — have banned pet stores from selling dogs. Is it shutting down puppy mills?
Ten days before Christmas last month, New York state passed a law that bans pet stores from selling some of the most popular pets in the country: dogs, cats, and rabbits. Just a week prior, Clark County, Nevada — which encompasses the city of Las Vegas — passed a similar law (which also forbids selling potbellied pigs), and this month, Washington, DC, did the same, covering almost every pet except fish (the law, like all DC legislation, now awaits approval from Congress).
The new policies represent some of the biggest advancements yet for animal welfare groups in the decades-long campaign against “puppy mills” — operations that confine breeding dogs in cages and pens to churn out puppies, many of which are shipped off to pet stores to fetch hundreds or even thousands of dollars. And New York state, DC, and Clark County aren’t anomalies: Since 2010, more than 440 cities, counties, and states have prohibited the retail sale of dogs, including the states of California and Illinois and the cities of Philadelphia and Houston. (Pet store retail laws still allow pet stores to work with shelters and rescue organizations to adopt out animals, something that pet store giant PetSmart has done for decades.)
But pet store laws are just one part of a larger campaign to crack down on puppy mills. Some states that are home to puppy mills, such as Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, have passed laws that seem modest on the surface — marginally improving conditions for breeding dogs — but have been restrictive enough to cause many breeders in those states to breed fewer dogs or even close up shop altogether.
The two types of laws appear to be having an effect. The number of USDA-licensed breeders in the wholesale pet trade fell from 4,604 in 2008 to 2,916 in 2022. (These numbers cover all pet breeders, including those that raise fish, cats, and other animals, but dog breeders account for most of them).
According to the Humane Society of the United States, the average number of dogs at operations licensed by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) is falling too, from 87 in 2012 to an estimated 57 in 2022. The organization also says the number of pet stores selling dogs fell from around 900 in early 2016 to 600 today. But pet store laws don’t touch the vast majority of dog breeding operations: An estimated three-fourths of dog breeders aren’t required to be licensed and inspected because they’re small or only sell in-person, unlike licensed operations that trade wholesale to pet stores or brokers, or ship puppies to customers sight unseen. (Disclosure: I worked at the Humane Society of the United States on a different animal welfare issue from 2012 to 2017.)
While the fight against puppy mills is one of the few bright spots in what is often an otherwise grim effort against animal cruelty, scores of inspection reports and investigations have revealed that many operations still keep dogs in cramped, filthy conditions, and it’s not uncommon to find dogs suffering from disease, starvation, or untreated illnesses. We may love our dogs — one survey found that Americans spend around $1,200 a year on average on their pups — but far more work needs to be done to clean up an industry that often treats man’s best friend as little more than a four-legged widget in a factory.
The rise of puppy mills and the obstacles to shutting them down
Pets symbolize our morally inconsistent relationship to animals — we love our cats and dogs at home and have crafted laws designed specifically to protect them, yet we eat animals from farms by the billions and largely ignore their mistreatment. But the first puppy mills originated on farms. In the 1950s, pig and chicken farmers began retrofitting some of their barns to house breeding dogs as an extra revenue stream, a practice the USDA encouraged at the time. Some judges have even ruled that breeding dogs are livestock, and in most states, breeding operations are regulated by the state’s department of agriculture.
Perhaps not coincidentally, more than anything else, puppy mills resemble industrialized egg farms: Breeding dogs are kept in pens or cages, sometimes stacked atop one another. Under the federal Animal Welfare Act, breeding operations are only required to give caged dogs six inches of space on each side of their body, though most exceed that minimum. On the smaller end, a commercial dog breeding operation will have a couple dozen dogs, while a larger one will have hundreds.
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ASPCA
At around 8 months old, female dogs become sexually mature and go on to produce two litters a year until their productivity wanes — after around six pregnancies — and the owner will kill them, or more rarely adopt them out, according to John Goodwin, senior director of the Humane Society of the United States’ campaign against puppy mills.
Breeding dogs kept in puppy mills are denied the opportunity to express their most basic, natural behaviors of running and playing to anything like the degree they would get in a normal home environment. Breeders are required to give dogs regular exercise, but “regular” is up to the discretion of a veterinarian and is hard to enforce, and operations can be exempted from exercise requirements if caged dogs are given twice the amount of required minimum space. Technically, in most states, a dog can stay in a cage or pen from birth to death — except when they’re nursing puppies — if they have one foot of space on each side and above them.
“USDA standards are based on survival,” said Bob Baker, executive director of the Missouri Alliance for Animal Legislation and a 40-year veteran in the field. “They’re not humane standards.”
Despite those anemic standards, Mike Bober of the Pet Advocacy Network, which lobbies for pet stores, admitted there are “definitely bad breeders out there,” but that he believes the vast majority of USDA-licensed breeders do well by their dogs.
Jennie Lintz, director of the ASPCA’s anti-puppy mill campaign, strongly disputes that notion. “They’re producing puppies in a wholesale environment, which tends to mean you’re focusing on quantity first, and using the least amount of resources possible to increase your profits,” Lintz said. “These animals are not pets. They’re there to breed animals to be shipped and sold to pet stores or on the internet.”
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The Humane Society of the United States
But some states have gone beyond federal standards. In 2008, Pennsylvania passed a law to increase the minimum cage size and exercise periods, require twice-annual veterinary exams, and ban wire cage flooring. Almost 80 percent of breeders in the state downsized or exited the industry after the law was passed.
In 2010, voters in Missouri — “the puppy mill capital of America” — narrowly passed a ballot measure to improve the welfare of breeding dogs in puppy mills. After pressure from the state’s dog breeders, the Democratic governor at the time — Jay Nixon — signed legislation to repeal the ballot measure and approved new legislation to replace it. The new law eliminated some parts of the original law, such as a cap on the number of breeding dogs and the number of pregnancies in an 18-month period, and instituted a longer phase-in period. But the new law also required more space and exercise access, and added prosecutorial powers that resulted in stronger enforcement. From 2010 to 2022, the number of puppies sold from licensed breeders in the state fell from 265,000 to about 100,000.
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But Baker says that for all their successes, working on a state-by-state method is “like playing whack-a-mole. … You knock ’em down in one area and they spring up in other states.”
Puppy mill operators might move to another state or sell on the internet, Baker said, which makes up a growing source of sales of dogs from puppy mills. Many dogs are sold through informal channels, like on Craigslist or at flea markets, while others are sold through websites like Puppies.com, which advertise individual dogs and then drive or ship them to the buyer’s home or arrange pick-up at a public location like a parking lot. If a breeder has fewer than five female breeding dogs or sells in-person, they’re not required to obtain a USDA license.
“They don’t want you to see the facility,” Baker said. “And that’s the big warning sign. … [If] they don’t let you see the parents of your puppy, then walk away — that’s a clear sign that it’s not a good facility.”
Weak laws, weak enforcement
Though federal protections for breeding dogs are weak to begin with, activists — and parts of the federal government — say they’re also grossly under-enforced. In a damning 2010 report, the USDA Inspector General (OIG), a federal office charged with investigating and auditing USDA programs, said the USDA’s enforcement was ineffective and that more than half of the 4,250 violators in a two-year period repeatedly violated the law after re-inspection. In the 2010s, the USDA started and stopped one scheme that allowed dog breeders to avoid citation for a violation if they self-reported and addressed it, and another that excluded minor violations from public inspection reports.
In a follow-up 2021 report, the OIG said the USDA “did not consistently address or adequately document 145 of the 322 complaints we reviewed,” and that the USDA is “not able to ensure the overall health and humane treatment of animals at these facilities.” In response to the 2021 report, the USDA told Vox it has since fixed its documentation and response issues.
Critics say that many bad actors maintain their licenses despite repeated violations. One Missouri breeding operation racked up 20 violations over a few years, including reports of cutting off dogs’ tails, starving Weimaraner puppies, one Shiba Inu who couldn’t move or lift the front part of his body, and two Mastiffs caged together who couldn’t turn about freely. And yet that operation continually had its license renewed and wasn’t required to pay any fines. (The puppy mill wasn’t a lone bad apple; the Humane Society’s annual “Horrible Hundred” report on some of the worst puppy mills in the country is chock full of equally depressing findings.)
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The Humane Society of the United States
According to the ASPCA, the USDA didn’t collect any fines from breeders or confiscate any dogs from fiscal year 2018 to 2022, despite the agency documenting hundreds of violations — sometimes over 1,000 — in some years over the last decade.
“The United States Department of Agriculture is absolutely captured and beholden to political and financial interests,” said Jessica Blome, who enforced Missouri’s puppy mill law in the early 2010s when she worked in the Missouri attorney general’s office. “It doesn’t enforce, it doesn’t do anything.”
In response, a USDA spokesperson told Vox: “[The USDA] takes the welfare of animals very seriously. Our investigative process for individuals and/or businesses found out of compliance with the AWA [Animal Welfare Act] may lead to an enforcement action. If deficiencies remain uncorrected at subsequent inspections, [USDA] considers legal action. Repeat non-compliances and serious incidents may warrant enforcement actions such as letters of warning, monetary penalties, license suspensions and revocations.”
While animal advocates have found real success through cracking down on retail pet outlets, they represent a relatively small proportion of pet sales overall, making up around 9 percent of dogs sold in stores. Cracking down on the growing number of online sellers is challenging, as is passing laws in states that host the bulk of puppy mills. In recent years the USDA has made only minor changes to its standards.
But advocates say the few state welfare laws and the wave of pet store laws, combined with old-fashioned educational efforts, are turning people off from buying puppies. Many groups like the Humane Society aren’t opposed to small-scale, high-end dog breeding, but they tout adoption as the most humane option as it prevents one more dog from being euthanized in a shelter.
That message has penetrated public consciousness. Consider these staggering estimates: In 1973, when there were around 35 million dogs in the US, 7 million dogs were euthanized in animal shelters; in 2019, 390,000 dogs were euthanized in shelters out of a total population of 80 million dogs.
“I think I can see a distant light at the end of the tunnel,” says the Humane Society’s Goodwin. “But by no means does that mean that this is gonna be done in one or two years or that we should take the foot off the gas.”
Some allies are becoming frustrated with Germany; Poland has said it will find a workaround to send its tanks.
Ukraine has managed to rally the West once again to supply weapons, including Bradley fighting vehicles, self-propelled Howitzers, and more, a month ahead of the war’s one-year anniversary. Though there’s been an enthusiastic response from many nations, Germany is still holding out on supplying the Leopard 2A$ tank, which Ukraine says could be key for a spring offensive — and which is causing frustration for NATO allies.
German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius on Friday at Ramstein Air Base in Germany told reporters that his government had not yet agreed to send the tanks or allow third-party nations that own the German-made vehicles to send them to Ukraine for a possible spring offensive. Defense ministers from allied countries met at the US military base Friday to discuss further weapons packages for Ukraine.
Throughout the war there’s been a high level of coordination between NATO and other allies, not just about weapons packages, but on applying sanctions to Russia and other forms of aid for Ukraine as well. Coordination on weapons packages requires diplomacy, and there are laws and regulations surrounding weapons transfers — hence the meeting at Ramstein and a Thursday confab in Estonia.
However, calls for the Leopards — and disappointment with Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz for refusing to allow their release — have overshadowed news of the weapons packages which are coming as a result of coordination by some 50 different countries. On Saturday, the Baltic states — Latvia, Estonia, and Lithuania — released a statement urging Germany to provide the tanks immediately. “Germany as the leading European power has special responsibility in this regard,” the statement said in part.
On Thursday, the nine nations meeting in Estonia — Denmark, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, the UK, Lithuania, Poland, the Netherlands, and Slovakia — all pledged their support for the larger package announced from Ramstein Friday. Those promises include training, ammunition, man-portable air-defense systems (MANPADS, namely the Stinger missile), helicopters, and anti-aircraft weapons, among other systems.
“This is a crucial moment,” U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said at the Ramstein meeting Friday. “Russia is regrouping, recruiting and trying to re-equip,” after successful Ukrainian campaigns in Kharkiv and Kherson this fall, he said, adding that “this is not a moment to slow down — it’s a time to dig deeper.”
As Austin noted, Russia could be planning a spring offensive building on this past fall’s mobilization efforts. And after pulling out of Kharkiv and Kherson regions, the Russian military — notably the Wagner Group mercenary unit and newly-designated transnational criminal organization — has been pushing back in a crushing battle over the city of Bakhmut in the Donetsk region.
A coordinated weapons package indicates continued Western support
Throughout the war Western and NATO support for the war effort in Ukraine has remained resolute, despite the potential for strain over rising fuel prices caused by sanctions on Russian energy, among other possible pain points. European nations and the US have supplied Ukraine with billions of dollars in weapons systems, training, equipment, ammunition, and humanitarian aid in the 11 months since the war broke out, spearheaded by US leadership.
In the latest package — announced just two weeks after the US pledged its largest-ever tranche of aid to Ukraine — NATO and other partners pledged increased air defenses, like Patriot launchers and missiles from the Netherlands and Germany, in addition to what the US pledged December 21. Those systems intercept incoming missiles like the kind Russia has been using to bombard Ukrainian critical infrastructure.
The US will also send additional Bradley infantry fighting vehicles, as well as Stryker armored personnel carriers, mine-resistant ambush protected vehicles (MRAPs), and Humvees — all of which will assist with greater battlefield mobility, particularly as Russian forces utilize landmines, even in civilian areas.
Sweden is sending its Archer artillery system, a type of howitzer which is extremely precise, easy to use, and allows for rapid redeployment of weaponry. These weapons systems fire long-range projectiles, and the Archer in particular is highly mobile, meaning it can deploy and move quickly. Denmark and Estonia are also donating howitzers.
The UK also pledged 14 of its Challenger 2 tanks — the first Western-style tanks sent to Ukraine during the conflict. Partners had previously provided Ukraine with Soviet-built tanks of its own and from former Warsaw Pact nations which have been decimated after a year of fighting. The new vehicles not only offer Ukraine modern tanks, but they also put some pressure on other partners to provide tanks of their own.
What’s the holdup in Germany?
Despite the significant new packages partner countries have announced, Germany’s reluctance to provide or allow other partner nations to send the Leopard 2 has become a major point of contention within the partnership.
Germany is refusing to send the Leopard 2 unless the US first sends the M-1 Abrams, with Scholz saying Germany won’t “go it alone” on weapons decisions. Critics of that calculus say that Leopards and Challengers are the only vehicles that are suited to the current battlefield, readily available in large numbers and easily maintained with current supply lines.
“The Leopards are in Europe, they are easy to get to Ukraine and several European countries use them, so they are readily available,” Minna Ålander, a research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told the New York Times Thursday. “Logistics and maintenance would be easier. Spare parts and know-how are here in Europe, so the training of Ukrainians would be easier.”
The Leopard 2 tank, first introduced in 1979, is in use in 13 countries. There are about 2,000 of them spread across those European nations, all with different tweaks, levels of upgrade, and battle readiness, a September blog post from the European Council on Foreign Relations noted. Germany’s more cautious post-World War-II military culture has been a source of blame for Berlin’s hesitance to send the weapons.
While a large number of tanks would be important for Ukraine’s battlefield efforts — Kyiv initially requested 88 Leopard 1 tanks and 100 Marder-type infantry fighting vehicles, another product of the German defense industry — the small number of Challenger tanks coming from Britain won’t be a deciding factor in how and whether Ukraine is able to make major gains against Russia. Tanks offer both protection and firepower, and are able to maneuver in challenging conditions. However, “This isn’t really about one single platform,” Austin said Friday, according to the Associated Press, noting that the armored and fighting vehicles the US is sending will give Ukraine new battlefield capabilities.
US politicians, including Sen. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and House Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Michael McCaul have both called on the US to send at least one Abrams to Ukraine in order to force Germany’s hand.
Poland, too, is pushing back, saying it could figure out a way to send its Leopards with or without German approval. “Consent is of secondary importance here, we will either obtain this consent quickly, or we will do what is needed ourselves,” Prime Minister Morawiecki told broadcaster Polstat News Wednesday. Finland is also on board to send its Leopards, Morawiecki on Sunday said that his nation would go around Germany to build a smaller coalition of partners willing to send their tanks. “We will not passively watch Ukraine bleed to death,” he said.
Poland, Finland and the Baltic states as frontline countries — some of whom, like the Baltic states, were part of the Soviet Union or were subject to Russian and Soviet invasion, like Finland — have tended to urgently sound the alarm about the need to fend off Russian aggression. “The war is here and now,” Moriawicki said Sunday. “Do the Germans want to keep [the Leopards] in storage until Russia defeats Ukraine and is knocking on Berlin’s door?”
The factors that lead to tragedies like the one in Monterey Park are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.
A shooter opened fire at a ballroom dance studio, killing at least 10 and injuring as many more on Saturday night in the city of Monterey Park, a near suburb of Los Angeles. The shooting happened shortly after the conclusion of a nearby celebration of the Chinese Lunar New Year. The gunman is still at large and a motive has not been determined.
The Monterey incident is the 33rd such mass shooting — an incident during which four or more people are shot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — that have taken place in the US already since the beginning of this year. It follows shootings at an MLK Day celebration in Fort Pierce, Florida, and a shooting that killed 6 people in Goshen, California on that same day. The Monterey shooting also follows numerous such events last year including at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia, at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado, a shooting on a school bus allegedly targeting members of the University of Virginia football team, a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois last summer; at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma in June; at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas in May; and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York in May.
No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, more than 110 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 40,620 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.
Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis.
But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm.
“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.
Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years. But the recent shootings underscore just how embedded gun violence is in the US.
The US has a lot of guns, and more guns means more gun deaths
It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, and there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws.
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One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.
American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 42 percent of American households overall owned guns in 2021.
Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a January study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.
The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.
There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But a 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present.
“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.
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Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.
Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.
American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.
That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.
Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.
By contrast, nearly a decade passed after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: it did not ban any types of weapons, instead incentivizing states to enact new measures meant to limit who can access guns.
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Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images
“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”
While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.
The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”
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Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Congress in June passed a bipartisan gun safety bill for the first time since the 1990s. But the new law — which incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns — is not sufficient to fully address the causes of mass shootings. Certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.
The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic
In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.
Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”
As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”
We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.
For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.
Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”
This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2019, for example, a total of 13,927 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 6,368 — just over 45 percent — were killed by handguns.
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Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expanded the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — could proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”
One silver lining for proponents of gun regulation is that the majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, embraces language that first appeared in Heller, which permits some gun laws such as prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nevertheless, it placed an emphasis on historical analogies that could endanger many laws that enjoy broad bipartisan support. The future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.
Update, January 22, 9:40 am: This story, originally published on May 26, 2022 has been updated with details from the Monterey Park, Chesapeake, Virginia; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and University of Virginia shootings.