Salt Lake City transportation study seeks to improve west-east divide
Salt Lake City is initiating a transportation study to improve the longstanding divide between the western and eastern sides of town split by railroads and I-15.
Why it matters: Historically, west siders have been largely cut off from the city's more affluent east side, facing stalled trains and more limitations to get around town.
State of play: A team behind the federally funded study will work with community members to help identify issues and come up with solutions for drivers, pedestrians, bicyclists and public transit riders.
What they're saying: "The west side deserves more ways to connect, and this study is the next step in making them happen," Mayor Erin Mendenhall said Wednesday in a statement.
Go deeper: A Salt Lake City Council member's fight against stopped trains
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This story was published in partnership with the Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletter here. On Jan. 29, in a federal courtroom in Mississippi, U.S. District Judge Carlton Reeves delivered a ruling that just a few years ago would have been unthinkable: He found the decades-old federal ban on machine guns unconstitutional. At the center of the case was a firearm that seemed designed to provoke: an AR-15-style rifle named the 'NFA Whore, Whore-16.' It had a switch that allowed its user to select between three modes of fire: 'MARY' for safe, 'SLUT' for semiautomatic, and 'WHORE' for fully automatic machine gun. The defendant was also accused of illegally possessing 20 Glock 'switches'—devices that convert pistols to automatic fire—and more than 400 rounds of ammunition. But Reeves made clear that his decision had little to do with the weapon's offensive branding or the intensifying public safety threat posed by automatic weapons. He said his hands were tied by the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which upended Second Amendment law. Bruen mandated that modern gun regulations align with historical firearms regulations. Suddenly, judges were less arbiters of modern safety and more reluctant antiquarians, tasked with finding 18th- or 19th-century parallels for today's gun laws. While the Justice Department is appealing Reeves' ruling, it is among a growing number of decisions striking down gun laws in the post-Bruen era. At least three rulings in the past year have invalidated federal restrictions on machine guns, once considered settled law. Bruen has also imperiled concealed carry laws, assault weapons bans, and a host of other gun restrictions. A Trace analysis of more than 2,000 challenges to gun laws since Bruen found that a case's outcome now hinges on conflicting interpretations of America's complex and often uncomfortable past. As judges, lawyers, and historians argue over what history counts and what it means, gun rights groups have capitalized on the confusion—with sweeping consequences for public safety. President Donald Trump's return to the White House has increased the chances of more gun restrictions being tossed out. The president has ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to reassess how the Justice Department handles legal challenges to federal gun laws—a move that could lead the administration to stop defending them altogether. In April, the Justice Department asked a court for more time to decide whether it would defend the ban on gun possession by illegal drug users. More recently, the department settled a lawsuit over forced-reset triggers, in the process allowing the sale of aftermarket devices that boost a semiautomatic rifle's rate of fire. Many judges have openly admitted they're not equipped to evaluate whether centuries-old statutes match modern-day restrictions. 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The move let stand an appeals court decision striking down the ban. Within days, the sheriff in Minnesota's most populous county, home to Minneapolis, opened concealed carry permit applications to 18-year-olds. Other courts have upheld similar laws. A 10th Circuit panel backed a Colorado age restriction last November, and earlier this year, the 11th Circuit upheld Florida's ban on gun sales to people under 21. In Reeves' courtroom, prosecutors argued that machine guns are not constitutionally protected because they are 'dangerous and unusual.' Reeves, concluding that Bruen had rendered such thinking 'obsolete,' ruled that prosecutors had failed to present a convincing historical analogue from the Founding era to justify banning the defendant from possessing a machine gun in his home. But in dismissing the charge, Reeves didn't hold back from criticizing the selective and superficial use of historical evidence under Bruen. 'The ultimate irony is that the version of history endorsed in these (and other) decisions has itself been deemed untrustworthy by actual historians,' he wrote. 'The experts don't think lawyers and judges have gotten it right.' When deciding whether a gun law passes muster under Bruen, judges must choose which historical period to compare it to. Is it the late 18th century, when the Second Amendment was ratified? Or the post–Civil War period, when the Bill of Rights was applied to the states? The Supreme Court offered little advice, and while lower courts have cited both, most judges have prioritized the Founding era. Gun rights groups frequently call on courts to exclude other time periods. That's because there were fewer regulations—at least regulations written down as statute—compared to the latter half of the 1800s, leaving fewer historical analogues to pick from. Focusing on the Founding era also ignores crucial legal developments in the intervening decades. Saul Cornell, a Fordham University history professor who has served as an expert in dozens of post-Bruen gun cases, said more people go through Times Square each day in 2025 than lived in the state of New York in 1791, the year the Second Amendment was ratified. 'It's not surprising they weren't much concerned about gun violence in the 18th century,' he said. The 19th century, on the other hand, marked a pivotal transformation in firearms technology, with the advent of guns that let users reliably fire multiple rounds without reloading and more affordable, dependable, and concealable pistols, famously exemplified by Samuel Colt's revolvers. The proliferation of these guns in American life, particularly from the 1830s onward, coincided with a rise in social problems and interpersonal violence. In response, states and localities enacted tougher regulations. 'There is a tradition of firearms regulation in the United States,' said Brian DeLay, a University of California, Berkeley, historian who has also been an expert witness in post-Bruen cases. 'And its basic dynamic is that when there is technological change that is robust and practical enough to actually generate social consequences, it is met with regulation. It happens over and over and over again.' Still, Bruen requires courts to compare regulations designed for a time of agrarian communities and muzzle-loading muskets to laws addressing densely populated metropolises and semiautomatic rifles. 'The founders did not inhabit a world where a disgruntled 18-year-old could go and kill a couple dozen people in six or seven minutes,' DeLay said. Beyond the era, judges must also decide what kinds of historical sources should carry weight. Are only state legislative statutes relevant? What about common law practices, local ordinances, and territorial laws? In upholding the gun ban on people convicted of felonies, one federal judge in Illinois pointed to 18th-century manuals that instructed constables to seize weapons from the 'dangerous' or 'disaffected.' Even though those manuals predate the Second Amendment—and weren't written down as statute—the judge concluded that they reflect a longstanding principle of keeping guns away from people the government considered untrustworthy. For lawyers and researchers, identifying and verifying sources is difficult and time-consuming, requiring expertise and access to expensive legal databases that, while extensive, don't necessarily include all of the historical state statutes. As a result, governments defending gun laws are sometimes forced to start from scratch, hiring historians to build records on issues that haven't been deeply researched. 'There's tons of stuff that we haven't figured out yet,' DeLay said. Governments that forego hiring historians often end up relying on statutes born of bias. In an Illinois case in 2025, prosecutors defending the gun ban on people with felony convictions pointed to Founding era laws disarming Catholics who refused loyalty oaths, Colonial and Antebellum statutes barring enslaved and free Black people from owning guns, and 18th-century punishments for felonies that ranged from estate forfeiture to execution. 'Undoubtedly, today the disarmament of religious minorities would be understood as abhorrent, reprehensible, and a violation of the Equal Protection Clause—as would the categorical disarmament of Blacks and Native Americans, another practice pervasive in our country's historical tradition,' the prosecutors wrote. 'But, considered solely for the limited purpose of the historical inquiry required by Bruen, these laws nonetheless 'reveal conclusively the scope of governmental power that was understood to exist at the time the Second Amendment was adopted.' ' The Trace's review of post-Bruen challenges found more than 1,000 rulings in which judges compared a modern gun law to statutes from the past. Of those, nearly a third—more than 300—featured federal, state, and local governments citing discriminatory statutes. (The other cases we reviewed didn't include a historical analysis because the judges relied on precedent to make their decisions or otherwise determined that an analysis was unnecessary.) Governments that rely on discriminatory statutes are often successful. In 2023, a U.S. district judge in Illinois, Franklin Valderrama, upheld the gun ban on people with felony convictions even as he acknowledged the moral discomfort he felt by relying on such invidious parallels. 'As other district courts have pointed out, many of the historical laws cited by the Government are deplorable and certainly would not survive a constitutional challenge today,' he wrote. 'But, under Bruen, courts must examine historical analogues, and 'laws disarming enslaved people, religious minorities, and Native Americans—however repulsive to modern sensibilities—fit that bill.' ' Historians say the government may be relying on discriminatory statutes because its attorneys don't have a full understanding of the history. 'Those sources are relatively easy to find, that's one reason,' said Cornell, the Fordham University history professor. 'If states and localities don't hire historians, they go to those.' Gun statutes with discriminatory elements are more well-known, in part, because gun rights advocates have long pointed to them to argue that gun control is inherently racist, historians said. But research conducted by Robert Spitzer, a professor at the State University of New York at Cortland and a frequent expert in Bruen cases, found that race-based laws represent only a small minority of the thousands of gun laws enacted throughout American history. While important for understanding the role of firearms in racial politics, most historical gun laws did not explicitly address race or slavery but a wide range of issues, from public safety to militia regulation and commercial sales. 'You cannot dismiss old weapons laws by saying, 'Well, they were all based on race animus,' ' Spitzer told The Trace. 'It's just actually false.' Bruen has also created an asymmetric battlefield. Because the government bears the burden of justifying its restrictions—and good historical research is expensive—well-funded gun rights groups have a leg up. The Firearms Policy Coalition, the Second Amendment Foundation, Gun Owners of America, the National Rifle Association, the National Association for Gun Rights, and the gun industry's trade group, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, have participated in at least 61 cases challenging gun laws under Bruen, the Trace found. Of those cases, nearly half—29—resulted in a ruling finding a gun restriction unconstitutional. Legal wins for gun rights groups used to be far less frequent. 'The gun industry has a clear interest in selling more firearms, which is easier and cheaper if there's deregulation,' said Esther Sanchez-Gomez, litigation director at the gun reform group Giffords. Since Bruen, it has become 'less burdensome for them to file all these cases all over the country and then basically point to the government to raise this heavy burden of historical presentation,' she said. The imbalance in resources often results in judges having to weigh competing interpretations of history—one produced by academics, and the other by gun rights groups' experts. In many cases, government-hired historians are forced to defend their methods under adversarial cross-examination. Judges are increasingly aware of the challenge. 'The inexorable result of such a methodology will likely be, in this and other cases, an analytical product consisting of the best guesswork of a judge-turned-amateur-historian,' U.S. District Judge Sarah Geraghty wrote in 2023, upholding an indictment against a Georgia man accused of illegal gun possession. The Supreme Court seemed to confront the limitations of a strict historical approach in United States v. Rahimi, last year's challenge to a federal law disarming people subject to domestic violence restraining orders. The 18th century offered no direct parallel to the law—domestic violence was hardly recognized as a crime then. The court, in an 8–1 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld the law anyway, deciding that judges should consider the principles behind a regulation rather than requiring exact matches from a bygone era. Some legal experts hoped the ruling would clean up the confusion surrounding Bruen. But Sanchez-Gomez said Rahimi spawned a whole new level of ambiguity. Even with the shift toward historical principles, lower courts must now wrestle with how broadly or narrowly to define those principles when comparing them to modern gun laws. The outcome has been conflicting rulings on similar laws across the country. Appeals courts continue to split on laws involving age restrictions, felons, and limits on specific types of firearms and accessories. Though the Supreme Court has turned down several gun cases this year, these divisions make it highly probable that the justices will eventually be forced to take up more Second Amendment cases. Given the court's 6–3 conservative majority, more gun laws are likely to be struck down. But some experts see a potential, albeit ironic, long-term benefit of Bruen. The act of forcing governments and legal teams to dig deep into the historical record is generating a wealth of new research on firearm regulation. DeLay, the Berkeley historian, believes this work may ultimately call the Supreme Court's historical reasoning in Bruen into question. 'This renewed emphasis on history, text, and tradition is ultimately going to undermine the current contemporary foundations of Second Amendment jurisprudence,' he said. The picture of the nation's regulatory tradition that is emerging, he said, 'is not friendly to the gun rights interpretation of this history.'
