Gun-Control Groups Claim a Midterm Mandate, but the Constitution and the Courts Say Otherwise

Fresh off a strong night for Democrats, the nation's leading gun-control organizations are already drawing up their wish lists. The Epoch Times reported that Brady United Against Gun Violence called the results an opening for progress and named an assault weapons ban, background checks on all private transfers and new money for community violence programs as its priorities. Everytown for Gun Safety said its organizations spent more than $53 million this cycle and claimed to have outspent the NRA, Gun Owners of America and the National Shooting Sports Foundation, while Moms Demand Action said 325 of the 403 called races involving its volunteer candidates were wins.

The groups see openings in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures expects Democrats to control 24 legislatures to Republicans' 21, and Democrats will take over the Texas House in January, where about 35 firearm bills, most of them gun-control measures, have been pre-filed, the Epoch Times reported, citing the NRA.

The Second Amendment does not bend to election returns. Its text declares that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed," and the Supreme Court has enforced those words. In District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008, the Court held that the amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense and struck down the capital's handgun ban; in McDonald v. City of Chicago in 2010, it applied that right to the states, as the Court later summarized.

Then came New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen in 2022. Writing for a 6-3 majority, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the Constitution protects an individual's right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home, and that when the amendment's plain text covers someone's conduct, the government must show its rule is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation. The Court also refused to treat the right to bear arms as a lesser, second-tier freedom.

This past June, the justices applied that test again. In Wolford v. Lopez, a 6-3 majority led by Justice Samuel Alito struck down a Hawaii law that barred permit holders from carrying on private property open to the public unless the owner gave consent. "This regime hobbles what the Second Amendment protects," Alito wrote, according to the National Constitution Center. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

Any new ban or carry restriction will have to survive that framework, and under Bruen the burden falls on the government, not on the citizen.

The safety research is more complicated than the slogans. A 2013 report from the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council noted estimates of defensive gun uses by victims ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million a year, compared with about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008. The report also cited a far lower estimate of 108,000 and acknowledged that the figures are disputed. But it found studies showing "consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims" than among victims who resisted in other ways.

Those findings matter to rural families far from help and to congregations that have already been targeted.

The NRA's director of public affairs, Justin Davis, told the Epoch Times that polling put guns at 1 to 3 percent of voters' concerns and said "this was not a gun control mandate election". He said the NRA expects court challenges and has lobbyists in all 50 states, and the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said its state affiliates are preparing for action in every capital.

The federal government is enforcing the right as well. As Liberty Bell Report has covered, the Justice Department sued Glendale, Calif., on Nov. 9 after the city raised the total cost of a first concealed-carry permit to between $1,971 and $2,106, up from a $100 fee the year before. "Exorbitant government fees that interfere with this right are abhorrent to our Constitution," said First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli.

Courts remain the front line. In Maryland, the Silver Spring Jewish Center, an Orthodox synagogue whose members walk to services on the Sabbath, has asked the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to block a Montgomery County ordinance barring guns within 100 yards of places of public assembly, Just the News reported. A federal judge had already blocked the county's ban on guns in houses of worship as applied to the congregation but declined to block the 100-yard rule, a decision the synagogue's motion says rested on "legal error". The filing cites an October 2024 attack on a visibly Jewish member just outside the building and says the county agreed that licensed carriers could carry the same handguns on the same streets if they drive.

New majorities will be seated in January, and gun-control groups are setting their sights on statehouses from Austin to the Upper Midwest. Each one will meet the same constitutional test the Supreme Court has now applied in Heller, McDonald, Bruen and Wolford. Elections change who writes the laws. They do not rewrite the Bill of Rights.