“It doesn’t need to be this way.”

USC women’s basketball coach Lindsay Gottlieb fought back tears as she said that. It was a post-game news conference, after her Trojans lost to UConn on Saturday.

Gottlieb had just opened her phone as she reached the locker room and found “a million text messages” about the shooting at Brown University—her alma mater. The daughter of one of her former teammates at Brown was at that moment taking shelter in the basement of a school library.

“We’re the only country that lives this way,” Gottlieb said. “It’s the guns.”

Two dead. Ella Cook and Mukhammad AzizUmurzokov were their names. Ella, 19 years old, was described as the “bright light” of her family by the pastor at her church. She was already a leader on campus, Vice President of the College Republicans at Brown. Mukhammad was an aspiring neurosurgeon, who was in the lecture hall where the shooting took place that afternoon to help his friend prepare for his econ final.

Nine wounded, a campus community traumatized. Lives forever altered, scarred, haunted.

But our country? A pang or two of sorrow, a secret relief for a second that it wasn’t our kids. This time. The 75th school shooting of 2025. And we move on—until the next one.

We’re the only country that lives this way.

And we’re told it’s a complex problem. There are many factors, many forces that contribute to the plague of shootings that kill children at schools every few weeks in America.

But I’m not interested in forces or factors here. I want to name names.

John Roberts. Clarence Thomas. Samuel Alito. Neil Gorsuch. Brett Kavanaugh. Amy Coney Barrett.

The conservatives on the Supreme Court of the United States have robbed the American people of their democratic birthright—the right to address a dire national problem through debate, compromise and appropriate legislation in their states and communities. They have crippled ordinary, constitutional self-government in this one area, and instead imposed a rigid regime of formulaic fealty to their tendentious, cherry-picked version of American history. The result is the continuing slaughter of the innocents—and the seizure of power by the Court from the people.

“When the channels of democracy are functioning properly, judges should be modest in their ambition and overrule the results of democratic process only where the Constitution unambiguously commands it,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a leading conservative jurist, in a famous law review article.

Wilkinson wrote that article 2009, right after the Court had decided, in District of Columbia v Heller, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, not a “collective right” to bear arms for service in a “well-regulated militia,” in the language of the amendment. He saw in the gun-rights case the same problem he saw in Roe v. Wade, the now-overruled abortion-rights case: “In both cases the constitutional text did not clearly mandate the result, and the Court had the discretion to decide the case either way…Each decision discarded the tenets of restraint.”

To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail, and only a nail. To an “originalist judge,” as those conservative justices like to call themselves, everything looks like an historical analogue, and only an historical analogue.

But a hammer can only do certain things. And history can only take you so far in resolving disputes under our Constitution.

The ownership of firearms in the early Republic was very different from the ownership of firearms today. That’s just a fact. The Founders lived in a society where there was a de facto universal military draft, and men were required to maintain guns for the safety and defense of the state, subject to government inspection, registration and ownership. Modern gun culture is…different. Market-driven. A sport, a hobby, a political/cultural expression, an obsession. Owning a firearm today in America is not a civic obligation, it’s a consumer choice.

The weapons themselves are drastically different. The Founders regulated weapons at at time when even a trained marksman could fire only two or three shots per minute, and individual accuracy was so poor that military doctrine of the time required mass volley fire rather than aimed shooting. A single shooter in the Revolutionary era? Maybe he kills two or three people before being overwhelmed by the lengthy and awkward process of reloading. Maybe. Our children—including the little ones at Sandy Hook and Uvalde—often face weapons that can kill dozens in seconds.

But you know this. You know we do not live in 1787. We live in 2025. So what is a judge to do when a free people passes laws to address a serious problem like the epidemic of slaughter from firearms guns in our country?

The Roberts Court’s answer: Put those people in a straitjacket. Constrain their democratic choices through the rigid formulations of an “originalist” reading of our history that is both egregiously selective and jurisprudentially immodest.

That’s the Bruen case of 2022, and it is now the law of the land when it comes to regulating firearms.

In an opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas, the Court announced in that decision a two-step test for Second Amendment cases. First, judges must ask whether the plain text of the Second Amendment covers the conduct at issue—carrying a concealed weapon, for instance. Does the Second Amendment clearly protect gun rights in that situation? Is it what the Founders meant when they guaranteed a right “to keep and bear arms”? If the answer is yes, then the burden shifts, and the government must justify its law by showing that it “is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.”

Look to history, the conservatives on the Court say, seeking to cloak their rulings in the raiment of impartiality. But history, as you also know, is frequently inconclusive. Why did the Roman Empire decline and fall? What caused the Civil War? Why did the American people elect Donald Trump twice? History is an endless conversation, not the fixed answer to an algebra equation.

In one of the great dissents of our time—one of his last opinions before leaving the Court—Justice Stephen Breyer called out the entire originalist enterprise, and its claim to historical omniscience.

“Courts are, after all, staffed by lawyers, not historians,” Breyer wrote, and then exposed the pitfalls of the originalist enterprise:

“What historical regulations and decisions qualify as representative analogues to modern laws? How will judges determine which historians have the better view of close historical questions? Will the meaning of the Second Amendment change if or when new historical evidence becomes available? And, most importantly, will the Court’s approach permit judges to reach the outcomes they prefer and then cloak those outcomes in the language of history?”

Breyer knew. It’s a game, this Court’s kind of originalism. Don’t get me wrong—I’m much closer to Judge Wilkinson than I am to someone like Justice William O. Douglas, the great liberal jurist dubbed “Wild Bill” for his creative way with the law (and for his love life). Judges should be conservative when it comes to the law—truly conservative. They should practice self-restraint and judicial modesty when faced with deciding issues that are triggering fierce democratic disagreements. They should respect the separation of powers. They should read the text as it is, and not use the old trick of squinting at it through friendly interpretive lenses, historical or otherwise. These values used to be the heart of conservative judging. They are in decline on the Roberts court, nowhere more than in Second Amendment cases.

So today we are now going again through the infuriating rituals. We mourn the young victims, and weep for the goodness and promise gone from the world. We scour every report on the identity of the shooter, desperate for an answer to the unanswerable question: Why? And after a moment, we start up the pointless political fight for the umpteenth time: How did he get the gun? How can we use this school shooting for our side’s political arguments?

What we cannot do is pass any meaningful legislation—debate and decide the contours of the laws that might protect our children. Thanks to the Roberts Court, we can only hold our breath and pray the dreaded call never comes to us.