Thomas, Kavanaugh lament 'decade-long failure to protect the Second Amendment'

Supreme Court Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanagh on Monday admonished their fellow justices for letting Second Amendment cases languish in the lower courts in a dissent to the tribunal's decision not to take up a gun rights case.

The last major Supreme Court cases to decide gun rights issues were McDonald v. Chicago and D.C. v. Heller, both of which came out more than a decade ago. Kavanaugh and Thomas, in the case of an ATM service worker who takes care of machines in "high-crime areas" but was told by New Jersey that is not a good enough reason for him to have a permit to carry a handgun, accused their fellow justices of ambivalence to potential violations of Americans' constitutional right to bear arms.

"This Court would almost certainly review the constitutionality of a law requiring citizens to establish a justifiable need before exercising their free speech rights. And it seems highly unlikely that the Court would allow a State to enforce a law requiring a woman to provide a justifiable need before seeking an abortion," Thomas wrote, in an opinion joined by Kavanaugh. "But today, faced with a petition challenging just such a restriction on citizens’ Second Amendment rights, the Court simply looks the other way."