The Everytown attorney’s reaction to the so-called “vampire rule” ruling is less a legal rebuttal than a master class in rhetorical contortions. By insisting that a law barring law-abiding citizens from carrying after dark somehow survives constitutional scrutiny, the group’s spokesperson essentially argued that the Second Amendment dims with the sunset—an argument so novel it might as well have been pulled from a horror script rather than Supreme Court precedent. The court rightly rejected that premise, recognizing that self-defense rights do not evaporate when the sun goes down any more than they do when one crosses a county line. What makes the response “hilarious” is its tone-deaf attempt to portray a common-sense affirmation of the right to bear arms as some kind of radical expansion, when in reality the decision simply restored the pre-20th-century understanding that law-abiding adults may carry for protection whenever danger might strike.

For the broader 2A community, the ruling is another brick removed from the wall of post-Reconstruction restrictions that gun-control advocates have spent decades trying to normalize. Everytown’s framing—that public safety requires treating adults like potential vampires once the streetlights come on—exposes how far removed from empirical reality many modern gun-control arguments have drifted. Data from shall-issue and constitutional-carry states continue to show that expanded carry correlates with either flat or declining violent crime rates, undercutting the notion that darkness itself is a compelling state interest for disarming the law-abiding. The decision also signals to lower courts that time-of-day restrictions will receive the same skeptical eye previously applied to place-based bans, narrowing the remaining avenues for creative infringements.

Strategically, the outcome hands pro-Second Amendment litigators a fresh precedent to wield against similarly arbitrary rules, from “sensitive place” overreach to discretionary permitting schemes that functionally recreate the vampire rule in daylight. It also underscores a growing judicial impatience with interest-group talking points dressed up as constitutional analysis. As more circuits absorb Bruen’s text-and-tradition test, advocates can expect fewer judges willing to indulge the claim that the Founders secretly endorsed a curfew on the right to self-defense. For ordinary carriers, the practical takeaway is simple: the Constitution still protects the right to keep and bear arms after 5 p.m., and groups like Everytown will need better arguments than folklore if they hope to change that.