Background
For decades, the fight for full health freedom—as defined by a system in which full informed consent replaces the legislative reality and culture of vaccine mandates—has been an arduous one. However, there are important parallels between the fight for health freedom and the success that advocates of a constitutionalist view of the Second Amendment (2A) have achieved over the last 25 years. By learning from the success of 2A advocates, supporters of health freedom can change the culture, change the law, and change legal precedent, all in favor of health freedom.
Weaponized Emotion
The early 1990s represented the nadir of a constitutional view of 2A in terms of public opinion. This was largely due to the popularity of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (commonly referred to as the Brady Bill). The legislation, signed by President Clinton in 1993, established the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
The passage of the Brady Bill represented a perfect storm in which public sentiment was shaped by emotion rather than information. The bill was named for former White House Press Secretary James Brady, who was paralyzed during the assassination attempt on President Reagan.
In 1991, Reagan offered his support for the bill in what represented a major blow to many Republican supporters of a constitutional view of the Second Amendment. By the time President Clinton signed the bill, it had major bipartisan support. But then came the data.
Data Changes the Narrative
The popularity of firearm restrictions in the wake of the Brady Bill becoming law was a wake-up call to 2A constitutionalists. It demonstrated that straightforward constitutional arguments were insufficient to move public opinion when people were bombarded with a bipartisan blitz of emotion-driven propaganda about safety. It did not matter that arguments for safety were not backed by data; what mattered was that emotions tied to fear were more compelling than recitations of constitutional norms.
This is when 2A advocates got smart and began a long, data-driven campaign to restore constitutional rights.
The first major study to expose the flawed logic behind gun control laws came in 1997. Conducted by John Lott and David Mustard, the study was eventually turned into the best-selling book, More Guns, Less Crime. Using data from all US counties over 15 years, Lott argued that states with “shall-issue” (easy-to-obtain) concealed carry permits saw significant decreases in violent crimes like murder, rape, and aggravated assault.
In 2003, the CDC analyzed 51 different studies on measures like background checks and weapon bans. Ultimately, the CDC task force concluded there was “insufficient evidence” to prove these laws reduced violent crime.
Further studies indicated that states with relatively unrestricted firearm ownership laws had fewer instances of violent crime than states with highly restrictive laws.
These and other studies began to shift public opinion. This led to louder demands from citizens for a return to strict constitutionalism regarding firearm ownership, and it also helped pro-2A groups fundraise for judicial challenges to gun control laws.
Public Opinion Shifts
The popularity of gun control measures peaked in 1993 and has trended downward ever since. Even small spikes in gun control popularity following major school shootings have not impacted this overall trend. Crucially, recent school shootings have been even less impactful regarding outliers.
While support for a constitutionalist approach to 2A remains far stronger among Republicans and conservatives than among Democrats and liberals, this too is changing in a positive direction for constitutionalists.
A 2022 University of Chicago NORC study found that 29% of Democrats or Democrat-leaning individuals had a gun at home in 2022, up from a record low of 22% in 2010. This was followed by a poll from NBC News in November 2023, which found that 41% of Democrats said they live in a household with a gun, up from 33% in a similar NBC/WSJ survey from August 2019.
Also in 2023, the Johns Hopkins National Survey of Gun Policy found that among all Democratic voters who bought guns after 2020, more than half were first-time owners. Among those who purchased a gun since January 2020, significantly larger proportions of Democrat, Black, Asian, and Hispanic respondents reported being new gun owners compared to Republican and white respondents—meaning that while Republicans bought more guns in raw numbers, Democrats were far more likely to be buying their first gun ever.
Beyond trends reflected in mainstream Democrat circles regarding gun ownership, the far-left has also seemingly changed its habits regarding firearm ownership. The LA Progressive Shooters club grew from 2,700 to 4,500 members (about two-thirds growth) after November 2024, with training requests quintupling. The Socialist Rifle Association reported around a 40% increase in chapter membership, and the San Francisco Pink Pistols chapter reported surges as well.
According to the 2025 National Firearms Survey and updated analysis from Ammo.com, while a significant gap remains between the parties, the “new face” of ownership is increasingly diverse. Approximately 20% of new owners are Black and nearly half are women, many of whom reside in households that were previously firearm-free.
This “urge to acquire” intensified significantly following the 2024 presidential election, as documented in a study by the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University (published in Injury Epidemiology, 2026). The researchers found that individuals with liberal beliefs were twice as likely (a 2.11 odds ratio) to report storing their firearms in more quickly accessible ways in direct response to the election results. The study, titled “Changes in firearm intentions and behaviors after the 2024 United States presidential election,” noted that groups which felt threatened by the incoming administration’s policies experienced a heightened drive to not only purchase and carry firearms but also to shift away from secure storage toward readiness for self-defense.
Judicial Victories
While the country as a whole became more liberal in its social outlook between the 1990s and the second decade of the 21st century, the realities of gun ownership reflected a different reality. Following radical shifts in public opinion in favor of a constitutional position, 2A advocacy groups with newfound donor bases began waging a long-term judicial strategy to defeat gun control measures. These moves were largely victorious, even during periods of intense socio-political liberalism/progressivism in the country as a whole.
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), the Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense in the home, independent of any service in a militia. This was followed by McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), which “incorporated” this right against the states, ensuring that state and local governments were just as restricted as the federal government when it came to banning handguns.
The legal landscape underwent a seismic shift with the ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). In a 6-3 opinion, the Court struck down New York’s “proper cause” requirement, affirming that the right to carry a handgun for self-defense extends outside the home. More significantly, Bruen dismantled the previous “balancing test” used by lower courts, establishing a new standard: any firearm regulation must be consistent with the “historical tradition” of the United States. Under this mandate, modern justifications—such as a law’s effectiveness in reducing crime or responding to technological changes in weaponry—are no longer considered legally relevant. The downstream effects were immediate; by 2025, 29 states had adopted permitless “constitutional carry,” and over 21 million Americans held active concealed carry permits.
Recent rulings have continued to check the power of federal and state-level gun control measures. In Garland v. Cargill (2024), the Supreme Court struck down a Trump-era ATF rule, finding that a bump stock does not legally convert a semiautomatic rifle into a “machinegun.” Meanwhile, in Rhode v. Bonta, the Ninth Circuit initially struck down California’s ammunition background check requirement in July 2025, though the case remains in flux as it heads for an en banc rehearing in early 2026. These cases emphasize the Court’s current insistence on a strict textual and historical interpretation of firearm rights.
In Barnett v. Raoul, an NRA-backed challenge to Illinois’s 2023 ban saw a federal district court rule the ban unconstitutional in late 2024; however, the Seventh Circuit stayed that ruling, keeping the case in a state of high-stakes litigation. Similarly, Duncan v. Bonta has seen California’s magazine ban bounce between courts for years. Most recently, the full Ninth Circuit upheld the ban by arguing that large-capacity magazines are not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment but are instead “accessories” that fall within historical traditions of regulation. These ongoing conflicts continue to test the boundaries of the Bruen standard across the United States.
Many of these cases demonstrate that even in solidly Democrat-controlled states, the courts have been leaning in favor of 2A constitutionalist arguments, thus undermining the pro-gun control lawmakers in states like California, New York, and Illinois.
Legislative Victory—A Sweeping Victory
The transition toward constitutional carry evolved from a singular outlier, which aligned with trends in public opinion, to a sweeping nationwide trend over two decades, beginning with Alaska’s first modern law in 2003 and Arizona’s post-Heller adoption in 2010. Following an early wave that included Wyoming and Arkansas, the movement accelerated significantly between 2015 and 2019 as states like Kansas, Maine, and Kentucky removed permit requirements.
This shift effectively sidestepped the regulatory framework of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act by eliminating the state-issued permit—the primary mechanism through which many states traditionally facilitated or incentivized the federal background check system for public carry.
Legally, constitutional carry overcomes constraints of the Brady Bill by exploiting the difference between federal sales and public possession. Under 18 U.S.C. § 922(t), the Brady Bill mandates that federally licensed dealers (FFLs) conduct a NICS background check before a sale. However, the law was originally designed to let states act as the primary gatekeepers of carry rights through licensing. By passing constitutional carry, states essentially withdraw from this partnership; they remove the legal requirement to obtain a permit, which in many jurisdictions was the only time an individual’s background was screened specifically for the right to carry in public. While the federal NICS check still occurs at the point of purchase from a dealer, the state no longer uses the act of carrying as a secondary “screening booth.”
The movement reached its current peak between 2021 and 2024, with the addition of major states like Texas, Florida, and South Carolina bringing the total to 29. This trend fundamentally alters the “permanent alternative” provision of the Brady Act. Traditionally, the ATF allowed valid state carry permits to serve as a substitute for a NICS check at the gun counter. By moving to a permitless system, these states have declared that the right to bear arms is inherent and does not require a government-approved “alternative” to federal oversight. Consequently, in more than half the country, the government’s ability to use the permitting process as a mandatory background screening for public carry has been legally dismantled, returning the focus to constitutionalism rather than the state’s arbitrary regulatory discretion.
Health Freedom Held Hostage
The ability of governmental authorities (whether school districts, municipal governments, states, or the federal government) to mandate vaccines as a condition for access to public accommodation and other fundamental rights hinges on the 1905 Supreme Court case Jacobson v. Massachusetts.
This draconian case established that a state’s “police power”—the authority to enact laws for the health, safety, and general welfare of the public—outweighs an individual’s right to personal liberty in certain circumstances. The case arose when Henning Jacobson refused to comply with a city order in Cambridge, Massachusetts, requiring all adults to be vaccinated against smallpox or pay a $5 fine. Jacobson argued the mandate violated his 14th Amendment rights.
The Supreme Court ruled 7–2 that the mandate was constitutional. Justice John Marshall Harlan wrote that “the liberty secured by the Constitution…does not import an absolute right in each person to be, at all times and in all circumstances, wholly freed from restraint.”
In 1922, Zucht v. King affirmed that the precedent established by Jacobson applies to schools. This set the precedent for schools to exclude students whose families do not wish to “comply” with vaccine mandates.
Jacobson continues to be the major stumbling block to blanket health freedom. However, recent judicial rulings have allowed for limited workarounds to the otherwise highly broad precedent established in 1905.
In the current legal landscape of 2026, religious exemptions “defeat” the Jacobson precedent by invoking a higher level of judicial scrutiny that did not exist in 1905. While Jacobson traditionally allows the government broad “police power” to protect public health through “reasonable” regulations, modern challenges leverage the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. Under the Supreme Court’s “most favored nation” doctrine established in cases like Tandon v. Newsom, if a state provides even one secular exemption (such as a medical one) but denies a religious one, the law is no longer considered “neutral and generally applicable.” This triggers strict scrutiny, the highest legal bar, which requires the government to prove that the mandate is the “least restrictive means” of achieving a compelling interest—a test that most mandates fail to meet.
However, this “defeat” is not yet absolute or universal. As of April 2026, federal appeals courts remain divided; for instance, the Fourth Circuit recently upheld West Virginia’s right to deny religious exemptions for school vaccines, ruling that medical exemptions are “categorically incomparable” to religious ones and that Jacobson still permits states to protect the collective health of students. Conversely, other jurisdictions and state supreme courts are increasingly viewing Jacobson as an antiquated relic that must yield to individual religious liberty. This ongoing conflict between the “collective safety” logic of 1905 and the “individual faith” protections of today is currently headed for a definitive showdown at the Supreme Court, as petitions from cases in New York and West Virginia are currently awaiting review for the 2025–2026 term.
Crucially, if the Supreme Court rules in favor of the parents in Taylor v. Muhammad in the near future, it would likely establish that the government cannot compel children to participate in activities that violate their parents’ religious convictions without a “compelling state interest” that is “narrowly tailored.” While Taylor addresses the phenomenon sometimes referred to as the sexual indoctrination of children through reading material and classroom instruction, its legal DNA is about the limit of state authority over the family. If the state loses its power to mandate “exposure” to ideas, it will find it legally impossible to maintain its power to mandate medical interventions over religious objections.
Winning Over the Public
While Taylor could help to eliminate all vaccine mandates in schools (while retaining them in other situations), the health freedom movement would be wise to learn from the 2A movement, which determined that strict constitutional arguments are insufficient to galvanize major public support.
It can therefore be deduced that the health freedom movement must use data to expose the flaws in the “public safety” arguments that lie at the scientifically erroneous basis on which Jacobson was erected. If this basis is fundamentally undermined in the public square, it can then be used to undermine dogmatic interpretations of Jacobson while promoting state-based legislation which renders Jacobson moot.
This is why, in addition to educating the public about studies which demonstrate that vaccine harms are many—while for the majority of Americans, vaccine benefits are few—new replicable studies must be conducted to further bolster existing findings.
The Mawson Florida Medicaid Study, as Mark Gorton has pointed out, is one of the most compelling contemporary studies on the scale and scope of vaccine injury. Conducted in 2025, the study analyzed 47,155 nine-year-old children enrolled in Florida Medicaid from birth. Researchers Anthony Mawson and Binu Jacob found that vaccinated children faced dramatically higher risks of neurodevelopmental disorders.
Vaccinated kids were over three times more likely to be diagnosed with at least one neurodevelopmental disorder, including autism, ADHD, epilepsy, learning disabilities, and tic disorders, with 28% of vaccinated children affected compared to just 11% of fully unvaccinated children.
The risk climbed even higher with more vaccine visits, showing a clear dose-response relationship for autism. Most alarming of all, preterm babies who were vaccinated faced a staggering 40% chance of neurodevelopmental issues. The study’s massive dataset from Medicaid records paints a disturbing picture: the more vaccinated the child, the greater the likelihood of lifelong neurological harm.
In 2025, the McCullough Foundation conducted a major comparative study which produced a report that sends a clear and long-overdue message: vaccines are a major driver of the autism epidemic. After reviewing 12 separate studies that compared vaccinated and unvaccinated children, the authors found dramatically higher rates of autism spectrum disorder among fully vaccinated kids, often several times higher than in completely unvaccinated children. These consistent findings across different populations challenge the long-standing claim that vaccines play no role.
The 12 studies reveal not only elevated autism rates but also far higher levels of other chronic illnesses in vaccinated children compared to the unvaccinated cohort. The report highlights how the cumulative load of multiple shots, including aluminum and other additives, appears to trigger neuroinflammation and developmental regression in susceptible kids.
These and other studies can help to shift public opinion in the same way that studies pointing out the flawed hypothesis of gun control legislation changed hearts and minds on the issue of 2A. Just as 2A constitutionalists were able to win the battle of public opinion by packaging data-based information in a manner that appealed to both intellectual arguments and concerns for personal/family safety, so too can and must health freedom advocates exercise a similar approach when discussing the dangers of vaccines. Professional messaging and carefully crafted slogans will be essential to winning over a public that may not yet see this issue as an urgent priority.
There is already evidence that health freedom is highly popular, so long as individuals surveyed are questioned in a manner that is free of bias or leading party-political implications. In 2025, Brownstone Institute President Jeffrey Tucker and Health Freedom Defense Fund founder and president Leslie Manookian commissioned a poll conducted by Zogby Strategies to determine public sentiment on issues related to health freedom.
The poll asked straightforward questions about medical autonomy, informed consent, vaccine refusal, doctor speech, employment protections, school mandates, and retrospective views on Covid-era policies. It found supermajorities (often 80–88% agreement) in favor of core health and medical freedom principles, especially for adults. Support crossed party lines and remained strong (though somewhat lower) on issues involving children.
In this sense, one could argue that the health freedom movement may be in a stronger initial position in 2026 than, for instance, 2A Constitutionalists were in the mid-1990s.
The Judicial Catalyst
The precedent set by Jacobson rests on four tests. If these tests can be shown to fail, the precedent loses its essence and therefore becomes moot in all but name. The four tests are as follows:
- Necessity: There must be a public health threat.
- Reasonable Means: The measures must be effective in addressing the threat.
- Proportionality: The benefit to the public must outweigh the burden on the individual.
- Harm Avoidance: The mandate should not pose a significant health risk to the individual (allowing for medical exemptions).
Recent science can be used to undermine all four of the tests in Jacobson.
- Necessity: Whether or not there is a threat to public health becomes moot insofar as vaccine mandates are concerned if science shows that the vaccines do not provide relief from the real or perceived (e.g., exaggerated) public health threat.
- Reasonable Means: If vaccines have proven harms while offering little—or in some cases, no—benefits, it cannot be reasonable to recommend, let alone mandate, said vaccine(s).
- Proportionality: If the harms caused by vaccines outweigh the supposed benefits, a vaccine mandate is, by definition, not proportional.
- Harm Avoidance: Well-documented vaccine harms are demonstrative of the fact that a vaccine mandate accomplishes the antithesis of harm avoidance.
While courts could potentially rely on the expert testimony of scientists offering outdated, biased, or flawed views on vaccine harms, public opinion very frequently drives courts’ interpretations of expert testimony. In other words, just as public opinion in favor of a constitutional approach to 2A had a correlation with courts that were increasingly sympathetic to a constitutional interpretation of firearm ownership, so too can public opinion shift the culture of courts when it comes to leaning toward expert testimony on vaccines from those citing modern research on the wide variety of harms caused by vaccines.
The Legislative Approach
Just as constitutional carry laws have made elements of Brady moot, so too can health freedom legislation have the same effect regarding Jacobson. Jacobson has been used to justify state and other governmental/civic vaccine mandates. However, if state, local, and school bureaucracies are prevented from exercising the authority otherwise granted to them by Jacobson, this precedent loses all meaning.
The Florida Health Freedom Bill is a legislative proposal that offers a model of how a state where public opinion has already shifted largely in favor of health freedom can nullify Jacobson through straightforward legislation.
The following are key provisions of the Florida Health Freedom Bill:
Vaccine Exemptions & Parental Rights
- Conscience-Based Exemption: Would have allowed parents to opt children out of K-12 school, preschool, and daycare vaccine requirements for “personal or philosophical” beliefs (conflicts of conscience), matching the existing religious exemption.
- Mandatory Risk Disclosure: Required healthcare practitioners to provide parents with specific educational materials (including CDC Vaccine Information Statements and state-approved risks/benefits data) before administering any vaccine to a minor.
- Signed Acknowledgment: Mandated that practitioners obtain a parent’s signature confirming they received and reviewed the risk/benefit information.
- Alternative Scheduling: Required doctors to discuss options for the timing and spacing of vaccinations if more than one was to be administered.
Medical Autonomy & Access
- Ivermectin Availability: Authorized pharmacists to dispense ivermectin “behind-the-counter” to adults (18+) without a traditional prescription.
- Practitioner Immunity: Granted civil and criminal liability protection to doctors who prescribe or administer ivermectin in good faith.
- Ban on Financial Incentives: Made it illegal for vaccine manufacturers to pay, or for doctors to receive, financial bonuses for administering vaccines (treating such payments as “patient brokering”).
Limitations on Government Power
- Prohibition of Forced Vaccination: Explicitly stripped the State Surgeon General and the Department of Health of the authority to order mandatory vaccinations during public health emergencies.
- Permanent mRNA Protection: Repealed a “sunset” provision from previous law, making permanent the state’s ban on discrimination based on a person’s mRNA vaccination status by businesses, schools, and government agencies.
- Transparency: Required the Department of Health to make all exemption forms easily available for download online, accompanied by related informational materials.
Another legislative approach toward banning all forms of discrimination against non-vaccinated individuals (which would effectively undermine all vaccine mandates) lies in clauses found in landmark civil rights legislation.
Title II of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. § 2000a) prohibits discrimination or segregation based on race, color, religion, or national origin in public accommodations, such as hotels, restaurants, and places of entertainment. If vaccinated status was added to the existing list of “protected characteristics” for the purposes of the Civil Rights Act, it would become difficult to implement and enforce vaccine mandates. The same would apply to expanding the definition of protected classes to include vaccination status in state civil rights acts, including California’s sweeping Unruh Civil Rights Act.
Vaccines vs. Firearms
Previous sections of this document have explored how the health freedom movement can emulate the success of Second Amendment Constitutionalists. However, it is important to examine one outstanding difference.
Second Amendment Constitutionalists ultimately advocate for arguments that make it easier to buy a product—a firearm. By contrast, the health freedom movement will end up cutting into the profits of vaccine manufacturers by ending sales numbers that are artificially inflated through mandates. This means that the vaccine industry will fight health freedom, whereas Second Amendment Constitutionalists had the advantage of being allied with the corporate interests of firearms manufacturers.
Conclusion
In the early 1990s, when both former President Reagan and then-President Clinton were united in the name of gun control, it seemed as though Constitutional Carry was an impossible dream. In 2026, Constitutional Carry is the status quo in a growing number of states, while both Republicans and Democrats are becoming more enthusiastic about the benefits of firearms ownership.
The health freedom movement can replicate these successes by working to accomplish the action steps outlined in this document.
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