Since Bruen, lower court judges applying its test have been, to use a legal term of art, all over the place, a fact repeatedly highlighted during oral arguments by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who sought some, any, guidance on how the court should understand its own ruling. Again, lower courts are equally confused. One court, for example, decided that Florida’s ban on the sale of guns to 18-to-20-year-olds passed constitutional muster; another concluded that a federal law disarming people convicted of certain crimes perhaps did not.
A few judges have publicly aired their frustrations with the sudden analytical primacy of law-office history. “We are not experts in what white, wealthy, and male property owners thought about firearms regulation in 1791,” wrote one in 2022. “Yet we are now expected to play historian in the name of constitutional adjudication.” Another castigated the court for creating a game of “historical Where’s Waldo” that entails “mountains of work for district courts that must now deal with Bruen-related arguments in nearly every criminal case in which a firearm is found.”
Just goes to show how shitty, stupid, and partisan this Trump Supreme Court is.
It's a common failing of the justice system. There aren't enough judges and lawyers to handle the case load in a reasonable time frame. This leads to most cases being plea deals, because it's better to spend 6 months locked up than a year waiting for a trial date. This inevitably leads to a handful of people that should have been locked up long ago being free to commit more crimes until they finally go to far for a district attorney to ignore.
It sounds to me them like we have too many things that are considered crimes, and should loosen up the laws on the least harmful ones like nonviolent drug offences to prioritize the limited resources of the justice system on more serious cases.