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Breyer invokes Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings in scathing dissent of decision expanding Second Amendment

Seth Garza pays his respects with his daughter Lilly at a memorial on May 31, 2022, dedicated to the 19 children and two adults killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

Justice Stephen Breyer on Thursday invoked the nation’s epidemic of gun violence, including recent massacres in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, in a blistering dissent to the Supreme Court’s ruling Thursday that the Constitution provides a right to carry a gun outside the home.

“Many states have tried to address some of the dangers of gun violence just described by passing laws that limit, in various ways, who may purchase, carry, or use firearms of different kinds. The Court today severely burdens States’ efforts to do so,” Breyer wrote, in one of his last opinions for the high court before he formally retires following the current term.

The issue being ruled on “concerns the extent to which the Second Amendment prevents democratically elected officials from enacting laws to address the serious problem of gun violence,” he wrote.

“And yet the Court today purports to answer that question without discussing the nature or severity of that problem.”

Outlining that problem in his lengthy dissent to the majority’s ruling, Breyer referred to the slate of mass shootings in recent years — including at an entertainment district in Philadelphia this month, a series of spas near Atlanta in March 2021, an entertainment district in Dayton, Ohio, in 2019, the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida, the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colorado, in 2012, the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, “and many many more.”

He referred to the number of people killed and injured in each shooting referenced.

“Since the start of this year alone (2022), there have already been 277 reported mass shootings—an average of more than one per day,” Breyer wrote. “Gun violence has now surpassed motor vehicle crashes as the leading cause of death among children and adolescents,” he added, noting that in 2020, federal data showed 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms.

Seth Garza pays his respects with his daughter, Lilly, at a memorial May 31 dedicated to the 19 children and two adults killed in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.Brandon Bell / Getty Images

He cited studies showing that, in the United States, as of 2017, there were about 120 firearms per 100 people.

“That is more guns per capita than in any other country in the world,” he wrote. “Unsurprisingly, the United States also suffers a disproportionately high rate of firearm-related deaths and injuries.”

Breyer…

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