BRUEN IS DEAD! SCOTUS MURDERED IT AND, IN SO DOING, HAS SLIT ITS OWN THROAT

The worst thing that could happen in a Second Amendment case has happened.

During its conference on Monday, April 5, 2025, SCOTUS declined to review Antonyuk vs. James. Who or what could have caused this inexplicable, horrid turn of events?

Why didn’t SCOTUS, through John Roberts’ influence as the Chief Justice, make Antonyuk happen?

This didn’t happen because Chief Justice Roberts didn’t want it to happen. And the late preeminent Justice Antonin Scalia isn’t with us who would otherwise have made it happen.

This tragic turn of events comes as a shock to us at the Arbalest Quarrel, as any bad SCOTUS decision would, even though this one does not come as a complete surprise.

Recent Court decisions in non-Second Amendment cases, decided against President Trump, where Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Amy Coney-Barrett joined the Liberal-wing, might have provided an inkling of bad tidings to come.

But this doesn’t explain why two seemingly “Conservative-wing” Justices, would turn against the American people.

Has the Chief Justice, along with one or more of Trump’s three nominees from his first term, been personally compromised?

If so, this means nothing less than the loss of the independence of the High Court: the Third Branch of the Federal Government.

It is not ridiculous to think this. This failure of the Court to take up Antonyuk, after several delays, quietly, perfunctorily, and without explanation—where such failure destroys the sanctity of the High Court’s prior seminal Second Amendment rulings going back seventeen years, to Heller—is as inexplicable to us, as it is profoundly disturbing.

Realizing the extraordinary importance of a final resolution in the Antonyuk case, apropos of the sanctity of the fundamental, unalienable right to armed self-defense against the predatory beast, the intractable predatory man-beast, and the perennial predatory man-beast of government, we fervently believed Antonyuk was on track to become the fourth seminal Second Amendment case, augmenting the rulings in the prior three landmark cases. And we inferred Snope vs. Brown to be the second most important case, after Antonyuk. How could the Court not grant review of this case? We were wrong.

There is evidently no limit to the inscrutability of Government and of the venality of those operating within its labyrinthine corridors.  

In a series of articles published on our website in February and March of this year, reposted in abridged format in Ammoland Shooting Sports News, we discussed at length why the Antonyuk and Snope cases are, bar none, the two most important, consequential Second Amendment cases to come before the U.S. Supreme Court since Bruen.

And, as these two cases involve the most important natural law right, without which a free Constitutional Republic and a Sovereign People, cannot exist, these two cases are the most important to come before the Court, of all the thousands that have wended their way to the Court, in the last couple of years, regardless of the nature of the legal issue.

We considered possible SCOTUS scenarios once Snope vs. Brown and Antonyuk vs. James came to the Court, and the ramifications were the Court to deny review, or accept review and rule for the State against the Petitioners.

We did expect that the High Court would decide at conference whether or not to review Snope vs. Brown, prior to tackling Antonyuk, since the Court had pushed back on a final disposition of the Snope case a few times before taking even one look at Antonyuk.

We were puzzled at what transpired on April 5, 2025.

That the Court decided to delay a vote on Snope vs. Brown, turning its attention to Antonyuk, and thereupon denying certiorari in Antonyuk, suggests to us the Court won’t vote to grant review in Snope, either.

This doesn’t mean SCOTUS won’t grant review of some other 2A case this term. It does mean that any future Second Amendment case the Court may grant review of means nothing because the Court has just told the American people the right to armed self-defense, as a fundamental right, is and shall always remain a second-class right, as Justice Clarence Thomas had long feared and had scolded the Court for tacitly proclaiming it to be so.

The Second Amendment is on its deathbed. This is not exaggeration.

Back on February 12, 2025, in our article titled, “Scotus, Stop the Merry-Go-Round On The Second Amendment Antonyuk Case Impacting Bruen, Grant the Writ of Certiorari,” we stated,

The U.S. Supreme Court must take up this [the Antonyuk] case. If it fails to do so, that means the New York Hochul Government has won. . . Further weakening of a citizen’s right to keep and bear arms in New York will continue . . . until nothing is left of the right.

As important as the pending Snope case is . . . , Antonyuk is, without doubt, the most important Second Amendment case to come before the Court since Bruen because it directly impacts Bruen in a way that no other pending case does. The new York State CCIA is both a direct response to Bruen and operates in open and blatant defiance of it. . . .

If the Court does review this case, it must strike down the guts of New York’s amendments to its Handgun Law. If it rules in favor of the New York Government, then the Court slits its own throat by undermining its own decision in Bruen and it opens the Country up to tyranny. Bruen would be functionally dead as would the second amendment, [and] freedom, and liberty.

Nor can the Court take a pass on this case. For the result is the same.

The New York Government has treated the Bruen rulings as garbage and has treated the Court, the Third Branch of the U.S. Government, as a Branch without credible authority.

If New York can arrogantly, defiantly violate the Bruen rulings, which were, after all, directed, first and foremost at New York, then any other jurisdiction will feel confident it may do the same, perceiving it has tacit “license” to do so. The Bruen rulings will cease to have meaning and significance.

Anti-Second Amendment states would then see the Court in the same vein as the world has perceived the demented, dementia-riddled Joe Biden, and his Administration—as [an] effete, ineffectual, frightened, and imbecilic little creature, to be taken advantage of or simply ignored.

Anti-Second Amendment states and local jurisdictions would be constantly emboldened to continue violating the citizen’s fundamental right to armed self-defense, and they would act aggressively—flagrantly violating the law and the Constitution.  

In time, the right to armed self-defense in the public domain and even in the home would be second-guessed. That would result in a deleterious domino effect. Heller and McDonald will in turn be weakened. For, each case depends on and clarifies points of the others. They are all connected.

We hope and pray that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito have as much sway over Chief Justice Roberts as had the late eminent Justice, Antonin Scalia.

They must impress on Chief Justice Roberts, and on the other ostensibly Conservative-wing Justices, the imperative need to take up Antonyuk this term and to strike down New York’s ridiculous and dangerous Handgun Law. And they must hold that the date of ratification of the Bill of Rights, in 1791, is the date on which the methodological test of “Historical Tradition” in Second Amendment cases must rest.”

Jump forward to April 5, 2025. Antonyuk is dead—a case that has taken well over two years to make it to SCOTUS on a final appealable order. And Bruen has died with it.

Our guess is that Justices Thomas and Alito are, understandably, apoplectic with rage at the cowardice exhibited by the other ostensibly Conservative-wing Justices to support them. So, they likely didn’t, this time, bother to write a dissenting comment that would have supported taking up the case, striking down the CCIA.

Plainly these two stalwart Justices could not muster support from at least three other Justices to strike down the unconstitutional, unconscionable New York “Concealed Carry Improvement Act.”

So, rather than voting to grant certiorari—which only requires four votes—Chief Justice Roberts may have offered Justices Thomas and Alito a choice to allow the petition for review to die at conference or to accept review of the case where a majority of the Court would eventually find the “Concealed Carry Improvement Act” (CCIA) constitutional.

The effect of such a “choice” is dire, amounting to no real choice at all.

Still, the Liberal-wing would love to see the case taken up only to rule in favor of New York.

Chief Justice Roberts and at least one other Associate Justice would have gone along with a ruling favoring the New York Government, thereby creating a narrow majority, sufficient to defeat the Petitioners’ hope for redemption after well over two years of enormous effort and the expenditure of substantial funds to vindicate the Bruen rulings.

The abject failure of the U.S. Supreme Court to enforce its own rulings is painful to behold. Where are the originalists and textualists among the Justices?

This methodology—employed by the late Associate Justice Scalia, a methodology that was, for decades, the mainstay of jurisprudential analysis at the High Court—is at an end.

The two remaining adherents of that methodology, Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, cannot maintain it by themselves.

And Trump’s three nominations were, we see, not up to the task.

Here, then, is a newsflash for the legacy Press: The U.S. Supreme Court does not sit six Conservative-wing Justices. There remain only two after Scalia’s death—the preeminent Associate Justice of our time.

Of the remaining seven Justices on the Court, there are three far-left Internationalists, and four anemic, inconsistent fence-sitters, ever buffeted hither and yon by the prevailing political wind.

SCOTUS need now only throw Bruen into a ditch and cover it with dirt. The Court can bury Heller and McDonald with it.

The rulings in all three cases are frozen in time, to be systematically whittled away by the Marxist State Governments.

Snope is now an afterthought. For, the decision not to review Antonyuk does not bode well for that Snope.

Snope is important, but not as important as Antonyuk because Antonyuk was the only case operating as a direct challenge to Bruen.

Mainstream media simply refers to the Court’s decision to deny review of Antonyuk, as a decision to forego reviewing New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act (CCIA), “Sensitive Place” restrictions” mandate and the “Good Moral Character” requirement.

Yet, the impact of the High Court’s failure to review Antonyuk goes far beyond a failure to review two major components of the New York’s CCIA.

The Duke Center for Firearms Law views the denial of the Writ for Certiorari as an attack on a core aspect of Bruen and Heller—the standard of review to be employed by reviewing courts when testing the constitutionality of a governmental action that impacts the core of the Second Amendment.

The Duke Center for Firearms Law said,

The Court re-distributed Antonyuk—the New York post-Bruen sensitive places and licensing case—for last week's conference and denied cert this morning.  This development can be read as at least an implicit endorsement of the Second Circuit's observation that "[i]t would be incongruous to deem the right to keep and bear arms fully applicable to the States by Reconstruction standards but then define its scope and limitations exclusively by 1791 standards."

If true, this suggests that SCOTUS wishes to avoid any discussion of the historical tradition standard, aware that it is a nebulous, essentially unworkable concept. But that is how Chief Justice Roberts and, apparently, several other Justices wish to leave it, rather than tackling the problem with this standard, head-on.

In a short statement about the Court’s denial of the Writ of Certiorari, that appeared on the Governor’s official website, Kathy Hochul said,

New York's strong gun safety laws save lives, and gun violence has declined by 53 percent since a pandemic-era peak. In 2022, after the Supreme Court decided to overturn New York's century-old concealed carry laws, I fought to pass new legislation to keep our streets and subways safe from gun violence — and we got it done. Today, the Supreme Court has officially rejected an attempt to block this critical legislation, ensuring the core tenets of the law I signed in 2022 will remain in effect. Public safety will always be my top priority, and I'll continue fighting to keep New Yorkers safe.

Public safety was never Hochul’s concern despite her assertion to the contrary, judging by the continuous criminal violence plaguing New York and the insouciance of the State’s Criminal Justice System to rid the streets of legions of psychopathic killers and dangerous lunatics running amok. But, as for her remark that, “the Supreme Court has officially rejected an attempt to block this critical legislation, ensuring the core tenets of the law I signed in 2022 will remain in effect,” she is, unfortunately, correct.

SCOTUS has stamped the  “Concealed Carry Improvement Act” with its official imprimatur. Hochul will use that imprimatur to add further draconian measures to the New York Handgun Law.

Other States will take notice of this. They will pay even less heed to the High Court, now.

But blame for this New York CCIA abomination rests principally with the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court has effectively struck down Bruen, and, with that, it has destroyed its own authority and credibility.

America’s Patriots must harbor no illusion as to the deadly import of this awful decision by the Court. For, the failure to grant review in Antonyuk operates as no less than a decision, and the worst possible decision, had it granted review of the case, and ruled for the New York Government. The effect of denial of Certiorari is the same. The Court has essentially destroyed Bruen, McDonald, and the parent case, Heller, and has, thereby, slit its own throat.

The only upside to this is that the citizenry should now realize that the Right of the people to keep and bear arms does not rely, nor ought it ever rely, on Congress, on the President, on the U.S. Supreme Court, or on the States, or on any other transitory, man-made contrivance.

Rather, the God-given Right rests, ultimately, where it had always rested and must always reside—intrinsically, inextricably, eternally—in the American people themselves.

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