This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, June 27th, 2004.

I'm Keila Brown.

The Supreme Court's Bruin decision establishing a new framework for judging restrictions on the private

ownership of firearms sits uncomfortably alongside federal laws that disenfranchised tens of millions

of Americans who might otherwise avail themselves of that

particular constitutional right. In the recently decided Rahimi case the

Supreme Court wrestled with the disenfranchisement of one man, Zachy Rahimi.

Cato's Clark Neely details what happened

and provides implications for future Second Amendment litigation.

So we're here obviously to talk about the Rahimi decision from the US Supreme Court, but to set the table a little bit, the Supreme Court recently came out with what's known as the Bruin decision, which used a, well, I guess a different

set of ideas for attacking future restrictions on the private ownership of firearms.

Can you describe that case and where it sort of left the court in terms of the framework that it is supposed to be using going forward to look at those kinds of restrictions.

So this case

because it involved a New York law that gave local officials

essentially unfettered discretion to decide who could get a permit

to carry a gun outside their home.

And there is no other constitutional right

that gives government officials unfettered,

unreviewable discretion about who gets to exercise

a constitutional right.

So on its face a pretty easy case, but what was unusual about Bruin is that it took a very new

approach to constructing an analytical framework that judges apply to decide how

...