The Department of Justice’s finding that UC Davis Medical School is still sorting applicants by race—despite the Supreme Court’s 2023 ruling—lays bare how entrenched identity politics remain inside taxpayer-funded institutions. Rather than treating every aspiring doctor as an individual judged on merit, the school apparently continues to weigh skin color as a decisive factor, effectively telling high-achieving students from disfavored groups that their test scores and clinical experience count for less. That same mindset has long infected the institutions that shape public policy on firearms: when elite universities and their alumni networks view constitutional rights through an equity lens, the Second Amendment is recast not as an individual safeguard but as a privilege to be rationed according to demographic spreadsheets.
For the 2A community the lesson is straightforward—legal victories at the Supreme Court are only as durable as the bureaucracies tasked with obeying them. Just as affirmative-action holdouts keep finding work-arounds in medical-school admissions, state attorneys general and campus administrators keep testing the edges of Bruen and Heller by imposing discretionary “good cause” standards, red-flag regimes, and magazine bans that function as de-facto racial gatekeeping under neutral-sounding language. When government actors refuse to color-blind the admissions office, there is little reason to expect them to color-blind the gun counter; both arenas reveal the same impulse to decide who is “worthy” of fundamental liberties.
The practical takeaway is renewed vigilance at every level: alumni donors should condition gifts on color-blind admissions, state legislatures must codify explicit penalties for agencies that flout Supreme Court precedent, and grassroots organizations need to track which medical schools feed future expert witnesses who will later testify that “public health” requires disarming certain populations. If UC Davis can’t be trusted to pick doctors without a racial scorecard, the rest of us shouldn’t trust it—or any similarly captured institution—to decide who may keep and bear arms.
