The Supreme Court upholds a gun control law intended to protect domestic violence victims

Roberts turned to history in his opinion. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.

Some courts have gone too far, Roberts wrote, in applying Bruen and other gun rights cases. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” he wrote.

In dissent, Thomas wrote, the law “strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process.”

The government “failed to produce any evidence” that the law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, he wrote.

“Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” Thomas wrote.

Am I taking crazy pills? Why is some arbitrary reading of history the sole mechanism by which these opinions are being made? What happened to the textual literalism these justices claimed to follow? Doesn't that require reading the words in the Constitution and making judgements from that?

Why is the arbitrary choice of legislative implementation of the state governments of the 1800s determining what laws states are allowed to have in the 2000s? If they passed a law that was unconstitutional, but no one challenged it for 200 years, then it's suddenly not only constitutional, but now a metric against which new laws can be judged to determine if they are constitutional? How is that anything but laws "trapped in amber"?

Did I miss the slow court transition to this singular decision-making process? Or was this a sudden shift that I just missed the headlines? I knew they used suspicious historical reasoning in Dobbs to throw out abortion rights, but do they do that for every case now?