On the evening of Wednesday, May 27, 2026, someone tried to weaponize the police against a sitting Justice of the United States Supreme Court. A caller told Fairfax County, Virginia authorities, through the department’s non-emergency line just after 9 p.m., that gunshots had been heard at the home of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It was a hoax — a “swatting” attempt, designed to send armed officers charging toward her front door under the belief that violence was already underway.
Mercifully, it failed. Dispatchers grew suspicious when they could not reach the caller back, Fairfax County officers immediately coordinated with the Supreme Court security detail already assigned to the residence, and they quickly determined the report was fictitious. No gunfire, no emergency, no additional resources required. Justice Barrett, who joined the Court in 2020, was on the bench the next morning. But the fact that nothing happened should not obscure what was attempted, or why.
What Swatting Actually Is
Swatting is not a prank. It is the deliberate manufacture of a false emergency — a fabricated report of a shooting, a hostage situation, a murder in progress — calculated to summon a heavily armed police response to an unsuspecting home. Officers arrive expecting a gunfight. The person inside is reading a book or watching television. That collision of adrenaline and confusion is precisely where people die.
It has already killed. In 2017, an online dispute over a game of Call of Duty led to the death of an innocent man in Wichita, Kansas. Casey Viner, then 19, of North College Hill, Ohio, asked Tyler Barriss to “swat” another gamer, Shane Gaskill, and supplied an address — 1033 W. McCormick — where Gaskill no longer lived. Barriss called Wichita police claiming a man had shot his father and was holding his family at gunpoint. When Andrew Finch, who actually lived there, stepped onto his porch and dropped his hands, an officer shot and killed him. Barriss was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison. Viner pleaded guilty to conspiracy and obstruction of justice in what U.S. Attorney Stephen McAllister called the nation’s first death during a swatting incident. McAllister, the former dean of the University of Kansas law school and a onetime clerk to Justice Clarence Thomas, prosecuted the case himself.
That is the machinery someone pointed at Justice Barrett’s family.
A Pattern, Not an Isolated Incident
I want to be precise about what this is. This is not the first time a conservative member of the Court has been targeted, and the pattern is unmistakable. In 2022, a man flew from California with firearms and burglary tools and was arrested near Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s home, having traveled there to kill him. After the Dobbs leak, organized protests gathered outside the private residences of the conservative justices — and only the conservative justices — while the Attorney General declined to treat that intimidation as the crime it plainly was. Justice Barrett’s own family has been a repeated target: earlier in 2025, a fraudulent bomb threat was directed at her sister’s home in South Carolina, alongside other harassment.
Barrett is not a random target. She was in the majority that returned the abortion question to the people in Dobbs. She joined the Court in Bruen, which restored text-and-history as the governing standard for the Second Amendment. She joined Rahimi, which held that an individual may be disarmed only after a court finds him to be a genuine danger, and then only temporarily. She has, time and again, read the Constitution as it was written rather than as activists wish it had been. That is the offense for which she and her colleagues are being punished.
The Double Standard Is the Point
The disparity in how these justices are treated is not incidental. Molly Hemingway documents it in her book Alito:
The double standard for liberal and conservative justices is part of the information operation. Liberal justices who are not known for particularly rigorous thinking are exalted while the conservative intellectuals are ignored… Conservatives are lambasted for taking a small fraction of the speaking engagements that liberal justices do.
The liberal justices move freely. They face no protesters at their homes. Several of the conservatives cannot take their families to dinner without a security detail. One set of jurists is lionized for a workout routine; the other is hunted. That asymmetry tells you the threats are not about any single ruling. They are about coercion — a message that a justice who refuses to bend the Constitution to a political program forfeits his safety and his family’s peace.
Let me be equally clear about the converse: none of the justices, left or right, should ever face this. The liberal justices do not, and they should not. Criticism of an opinion is legitimate and necessary. Terror campaigns against the people who write them are not.
These are, by and large, careful and ordinary people who chose a life of public service and now wear the equivalent of body armor to do it. That a Supreme Court appointment has become a dangerous job is an indictment of the moment we are living in — and a reality every student of the Court, and of the Second Amendment, needs to understand.
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.