Washington’s highest court just green-lit a lifetime gun ban triggered by nothing more than a pair of DUI convictions, and the 5-4 split reveals how fragile the right to keep and bear arms has become once courts start treating misdemeanors like disqualifying felonies. The majority essentially decided that two instances of impaired driving—serious, yes, but not violent crimes—now carry the same constitutional weight as armed robbery or domestic assault when it comes to stripping citizens of their Second Amendment rights. That leap turns the “shall not be infringed” language into a policy preference that five justices can rewrite whenever public-safety rhetoric sounds compelling enough.

What makes the dissent especially sharp is its reminder that historical tradition, not modern risk-assessment spreadsheets, is supposed to guide these cases after Bruen. Nothing in the Founding era or Reconstruction supports permanently disarming someone for drunk driving; the closest analogues were narrow, temporary restrictions on “dangerous” individuals who posed an imminent threat, not blanket lifetime bans based on traffic offenses. By ignoring that history, the Washington court effectively invites every state legislature to keep expanding the list of misdemeanors that quietly convert otherwise law-abiding adults into prohibited persons, all without ever calling the restriction a “felony.”

For the 2A community the message is clear: the battlefield has shifted from outright confiscation schemes to incremental disqualification by a thousand paper cuts. Two DUIs today, maybe a reckless-driving charge or an expunged domestic incident tomorrow—each new precedent lowers the bar for who counts as a “responsible” gun owner. Law-abiding carriers in Washington and beyond now have every incentive to track these rulings closely and support litigation that forces courts to apply the Bruen test honestly rather than let public-policy hunches swallow the constitutional right.