The Supreme Court's Second and Fifteenth Amendment Hypocrisy Could Shoot Down Voting Rights...and People

The Bruen majority invalidated New York’s firearms licensing law on the basis of its supposed conflict with historical tradition, stating: “[t]he test that we set forth in Heller and apply today requires courts to assess whether modern firearms regulations are consistent with the Second Amendment’s text and historical understanding.” The Court’s disparate standards for voting rights and the right to keep and bear arms enables legislatures to expand access to guns while constraining access to ballots. Second Amendment expansion and voting rights contraction will particularly harm minoritized Americans. Research shows that looser gun laws lead to more gun-related deaths, and gun homicide disproportionately kills Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Native Americans. Black, Hispanic/Latino, and Native people likewise bear the brunt of voter suppression laws. This means that the Supreme Court’s insistence on expanding the right to keep and bear arms, while shrinking the right to vote, conspires to silence Americans of color whether denying them ballots or subjecting them to bullets.Part II of this paper discusses the ways in which structural barriers, such as discriminatory public/social policies, and physical barriers, such as armed violence, have kept minoritized Americans from participating in electoral politics. Part III of this paper argues that the Supreme Court’s diverging approaches to cases involving the Fifteenth Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and the Second Amendment effectively uphold and reinforce structural barriers to democracy and enable armed political violence. Part IV discusses the implications of the Court’s treatment of firearms and voting in the context of heightened political tension, voter suppression, and Second Amendment extremism. Part V concludes with suggestions for how to course correct.