Two law professors have an idea for how to circumvent the Supreme Court’s repeated rulings in support of the Second Amendment : use police officers to seize guns of “dangerous” people.

The 2022 Supreme Court ruling in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen “threw the political project of gun regulation into question,” Professors Guha Krishnamurthi and Peter Salib wrote in the latest issue of Notre Dame Law Review.

The scholars are not ready to give up. Instead, they want states to employ an “unlikely source of continuing power.”

“Qualified immunity shields state officers from monetary liability for many constitutional violations,” the scholars wrote. “In short, unless a previous case ‘clearly established,’ with high factual particularity, that the officer’s conduct was unconstitutional, the officer does not pay.”

Under their theory, law enforcement can “confiscate an individual’s firearm if the officer deems that person too dangerous to possess it.” Even if the justifications “conflict” with Bruen and other Second Amendment jurisprudence, the officer “risks no liability.”

They focus their attention on domestic abusers, but conservatives should be wary of how federal law enforcement would abuse their idea; our current Department of Justice is the same one that viewed a pro-life father as a threat and parents who oppose sexualized content at school board meetings.

“The result is a surprisingly free hand for states to determine who should and should not be armed, even in contravention of the Supreme Court’s dictates,” the professors argue.

The proposal is also meant to make a point by getting conservatives to be concerned about qualified immunity. The logic, the professors argue, is that once the police start seizing guns and getting away with it by claiming immunity, then conservatives who support, in their words, the “rigid Second Amendment” will begin to work to limit qualified immunity's use.

“Going forward, the doctrine will either provide cover for left-leaning states to disarm potentially dangerous citizens, even in tension with Second Amendment principles,” they write, “or it will be weakened, reinvigorating civil liability as a mechanism for policing the police.”

With their cheeky thought experiment in a student-run law journal, the academics think they have figured out a way to “own” conservatives (much like liberals, post-Roe v. Wade, who proposed men should be required to pay for the children they create).

“The possibility of qualified immunity as a gun control law thus poses a dilemma for the conservative voting public,” they argue. “Support qualified immunity and police, at the expense of gun rights, or vice-versa?”

The professors are sure that conservatives would turn against qualified immunity, or if they didn’t, at least guns would be seized.

But have they considered an alternative response? What if liberals, seeing that qualified immunity is helpful in taking away guns, begin to support it?

Nor is qualified immunity a one-size-fits-all bag. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Bruen decision, has also said there should be different standards for immunity with regard to a college administrator who violates a student’s rights and a cop who makes a split-second decision .

The proposal will probably elicit some positive reactions from other pro-gun control professors who think it’s ironic and that their peers “owned” the conservatives and won the argument.

Gun rights should be protected by state and federal law. That can happen while a meaningful conversation about the pros and cons of qualified immunity also occurs, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer to which government employees should have it and under what circumstances.

That seems like such an easy concept that even a law professor could grasp it.

Matt Lamb is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is an associate editor for the College Fix and has previously worked for Students for Life of America and Turning Point USA.