Then-Judge Neil Gorsuch hadn’t written anything squarely dealing with the Second Amendment when he was nominated to the Supreme Court; and while it seemed likely that he’d take a relatively broad view of gun rights (just based on his being a conservative, in an era when conservative jurists tend to lean in that direction), that was just a guess. We now have more evidence, from his vote joining Justice Clarence Thomas’s dissent from denial of certiorari in Peruta v. California — he, like Thomas (and, before his death, Justice Antonin Scalia), seems to be a strong gun-rights supporter, indeed likely more so than some of the other conservative justices. Like it (as I do) or not, but that’s the information we now have.
by Eugene Volokh