This week the Supreme Court quietly crossed a threshold that should matter to every American who cares about the right to keep and bear arms: Justice Clarence Thomas became the second-longest-serving Justice in the history of the United States Supreme Court. He has now passed Justice Stephen J. Field, who served from 1863 to 1897 and held the #2 spot for more than a century. Only Justice William O. Douglas, at 13,358 days, sits ahead of him on the all-time list. If Justice Thomas stays on the bench, he passes Douglas around May 2028.
I want to celebrate that milestone, because Justice Thomas has been the single most important judicial voice for the Second Amendment in my lifetime. I also want to use his career as a reminder for our community: when you feel ground down by Kathy Hochul, by hostile lower courts, by the slow grind of constitutional litigation — you keep going. That is the lesson of Clarence Thomas.
”I Don’t Like Bullies. I Never Cry Uncle.”
Most of you remember the 1991 confirmation hearings. The Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by then-Senator Joe Biden, tried to derail Judge Thomas’s nomination using the Anita Hill allegations. Live on national television, Judge Thomas refused to fold:
I’d rather die than withdraw from the process. Not for the purpose of serving on the Supreme Court, but for the purpose of not being driven out of this process. I would not be scared. I don’t like bullies. I’ve never run from bullies. I never cry uncle. And I’m not going to cry uncle today whether I want to be on the Supreme Court or not.
He was confirmed 52–48 on October 15, 1991, and sworn in eight days later. I bring this up because the same posture — refuse to be bullied, refuse to back down, keep fighting — is exactly what the Second Amendment community needs right now. Justice Thomas modeled it before he ever put on the robe.
The 1997 Footnote That Started Everything
Here is the piece of history most people have forgotten. In 1997, in Printz v. United States, 521 U.S. 898 (1997), the Court struck down provisions of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act on Tenth Amendment grounds. Justice Thomas joined the majority — and then wrote a solo concurrence that quietly changed the constitutional landscape.
Back then, the academic consensus and most lower courts treated the Second Amendment as a “collective right” tied to militia service. That was the orthodoxy. Justice Thomas refused to accept it. He wrote:
This Court has not had recent occasion to consider the nature of the substantive rights safeguarded by the Second Amendment. If, however, the Second Amendment is read to confer a personal right to keep and bear arms, a colorable argument exists that the Federal Government’s regulatory scheme, at least as it pertains to the purely intrastate sale or possession of firearms, runs afoul of that Amendment’s protections.
He went further. He cited Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833) for the proposition that the right to bear arms is “the palladium of the liberties of a republic.” And in a now-famous footnote he pointed to the “growing body of scholarly commentary” — including Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms and the work of Stephen P. Halbrook — supporting the individual-right reading.
That concurrence was the seed. Eleven years later, District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), held exactly what Justice Thomas had flagged in 1997. Fourteen years after that, in NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), Justice Thomas himself wrote the 6–3 majority that gave us the text-and-history test and the right to carry in public for self-defense. The man planted the tree and then climbed up and harvested the fruit.
The Colorblind Constitution
Justice Thomas’s discipline is not limited to the Second Amendment. In Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), the Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger, 539 U.S. 306 (2003), and ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions. Justice Thomas did something he rarely does: he read his concurrence from the bench. He invoked the lone dissent of Justice John Marshall Harlan in Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896):
As Justice Harlan proclaimed in dissent in Plessy v. Ferguson, our Constitution is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.
That is the same originalist instinct he brings to the Second Amendment — read the text, honor the history, and refuse to let a fashionable doctrine override what the Constitution actually says.
What the 2A Community Should Take Away
The lesson is not complicated. Justice Thomas spent eleven years between his Printz concurrence and Heller watching the lower courts ignore the individual-right reading. He kept writing. He kept building the record. He kept fighting. By the time Bruen arrived, the intellectual scaffolding he had been laying since 1997 was strong enough to carry a majority opinion.
So when an anti-gun governor like Kathy Hochul tries to nullify Bruen with sensitive-place gimmicks, when a hostile circuit slow-walks a clear winner, when the DOJ files a brief that makes you want to throw your laptop — remember the man whose tenure we are celebrating this week. He did not cry uncle in 1991. He did not cry uncle in 1997 when the academy laughed at the individual-right reading. He has not cried uncle for thirty-four years on the bench. Neither should we. Fingers crossed and candles lit — the next case on his docket may be the one that finally confirms AR-15s and semi-automatic rifles are protected arms. I am optimistic.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.