Nor is the Second Amendment absolutism that Justice Thomas is calling for reflected in the way the Supreme Court interprets most other constitutional guarantees. Judge Bruce Selya of the Court of Appeals for the First Circuit made this point in a majority opinion in November rejecting a challenge to a provision of the Massachusetts gun licensing statute. “Even though the Second Amendment right is fundamental,” Judge Selya, an appointee of President Ronald Reagan, wrote in his opinion for a unanimous panel, “the plaintiffs have offered us no valid reason to treat it more deferentially than other important constitutional rights.” That decision, Gould v. Morgan, will shortly be appealed to the Supreme Court .

My second point is to underscore the role Justice Thomas plays in creating this rhetorical tidal wave. He is a Federalist Society icon and a hero to many young conservative lawyers, including the 10 former Thomas law clerks whom President Trump has already appointed to federal judgeships. (A dozen other former Thomas clerks hold important nonjudicial positions in the administration.) They and their colleagues among the new Trump judges, many of whom clerked for other conservative justices, are the ones who are making the “second-class right” mantra a standard feature of any Second Amendment dissent — in other words, not only that a particular majority opinion is incorrect, but that it is part of a dangerous trend that the Supreme Court, by implication if not explicitly, needs to address right now.

For example, the full 15-member Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit recently refused to reconsider a decision by a three-judge panel to uphold the longstanding federal ban on interstate sales of handguns. Dissenting from that refusal, Judge James C. Ho, a former Thomas clerk who joined the Fifth Circuit last year, cited Justice Thomas’s opinions in observing, “Yet the Second Amendment continues to be treated as a ‘second-class’ right.”

His dissent included a subtle dig at Chief Justice John Roberts, who notably has not joined Justice Thomas’s Second Amendment choir. The government rationale for the ban on interstate handgun sales is that while federally licensed firearm dealers can be expected to know the laws of their own state, they may not be familiar with laws of other states and so may not know whether an out-of-state purchaser is legally entitled to own a gun.

That is not sufficient justification for the ban, Judge Ho wrote; if dealers could learn their own state’s laws, they could learn other states’ laws as well. “Put simply, the way to require compliance with state handgun laws is to require compliance with state handgun laws,” he wrote in a riff on the chief justice’s much-discussed line in a 2007 school integration case: “The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”

Judge Ho’s Fifth Circuit colleague Don R. Willett, another new member of the court, observed in his own dissenting opinion in the same case, “The Second Amendment is neither second class, nor second rate, nor second tier.” An appeal in that case , Mance v. Whitaker, is now pending at the Supreme Court, and the justices will decide this month or next whether to accept it.

Another new judge, Stephanos Bibas, dissented last month from a decision by a panel of the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit that upheld a New Jersey law limiting a firearm magazine to 10 rounds of ammunition. He said the state had failed to provide sufficient evidence that “specifically links large magazines to mass-shooting deaths.” Acknowledging that five other federal circuit courts have also upheld limits on magazine sizes, Judge Bibas observed that while judges were understandably concerned about gun violence, “they err in subjecting the Second Amendment to different, watered-down rules and demanding little if any proof.”