The Supreme Court expanded gun rights. That could complicate the Trump assassination attempt case.

The Supreme Court's recent decisions on Second Amendment rights have unleashed a flood of constitutional challenges to long-standing gun laws — including one being used to prosecute the man who allegedly tried to assassinate Donald Trump on his golf course this week.

Ryan Routh was arrested and charged with violating the federal ban on people with prior felony convictions possessing firearms.

That ban has long been a central part of federal gun-control efforts. But many of those charged under the statute — along with some gun-rights advocates — argue that the law is unconstitutional.

The issue has sown confusion in lower courts, and legal experts say it may soon need to be resolved by the Supreme Court.

"This kind of split among the federal courts is one of the biggest predictors of whether the Supreme Court will step into a controversy," said Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and an expert on the Second Amendment.

It's too soon to know what kind of defense Routh will mount, and any constitutional challenge may provide limited benefit considering his potential legal jeopardy. The 58-year-old man was arrested on Sunday in Florida after a Secret Service agent allegedly spotted him waiting with a semi-automatic rifle at a golf course while the former president played nearby. He is scheduled to appear Monday at a court hearing in West Palm Beach, where a judge will determine whether he can be released on bail.

So far, prosecutors have charged Routh with two crimes : possessing a gun with an obliterated serial number and possessing a gun as a felon. Prosecutors could move to add other charges later, including attempted assassination of the president .

Routh's felony record includes a 2002 North Carolina conviction for possessing a "weapon of mass destruction" after he was found with a fully automatic machine gun. He was also convicted in 2010 in North Carolina of possessing stolen goods, authorities say.

Those previous convictions mean that Routh is covered by the federal felon-in-possession ban, which carries a 15-year maximum prison sentence. But in recent years, courts have tussled over the continued validity of the ban.

Some defendants have argued that the ban violates the Second Amendment in light of the Supreme Court's landmark 2022 decision in . That decision broadened gun rights by declaring that gun restrictions are valid only if they adhere to historical practices from early American history.

The new history-focused legal test for gun restrictions left lower courts nationally in disarray as judges and attorneys navigate how to apply the new mandate.

Earlier this year, in a case about whether the government can take guns away from people accused of domestic violence, the Supreme Court seemed to disavow a rigid application of 's historical approach. But in some ways, the decision only created further confusion.

"If you look back at the founding era, the 1800s, you're not going to find laws from that time that prohibited felons from possessing firearms," said Andrew Willinger, the executive director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law. "This is a relatively recent innovation when we talk about the specific law, the specific strategy of saying that anybody convicted of a serious offense of a certain type is prohibited from having guns for life."

Two federal appeals courts — the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit and the San Francisco-based 9th Circuit — have concluded that it's unconstitutional to apply the felon-in-possession ban to people with non-violent felonies.

Several other appeals courts have disagreed, rejecting constitutional challenges and leaving the ban fully intact. These courts include the New Orleans-based 5th Circuit, where a three-judge panel just this week upheld the felon-in-possession ban . The Atlanta-based 11th Circuit, which covers the state of Florida and would hear any appeal in Routh's case, also upheld the ban in a ruling earlier this year.

No federal appeals court has fully struck down the felon-in-possession ban or declared that it cannot be applied to people with prior violent felony convictions. But the conflict in the lower courts over its valid scope — and how to apply the test — suggests that it's "only a matter of time" before the Supreme Court steps in to clarify the issue, according to Winkler.

The future of the felon-in-possession ban is the biggest question left unanswered after , Winkler added.

Amy Swearer, senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, agreed that the issue is ripe for high court review.

"A lot of this will remain unclear until the Supreme Court starts stepping up to show courts again in practice how this test has to be implemented," Swearer said. "Or you'll have a bunch of lower courts that have come up with their own tests."

Lower courts implementing the test have sometimes struggled to compare modern gun laws with analogous restrictions from centuries ago.

"The modern world is a lot different," said Kelly Roskam, the director of law and policy at Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. "The founding fathers weren't carrying AR-15s around."

Another complication in using historical tradition to determine who should own a gun is America's racist history.

"In the 17- and 1800s, America often barred African Americans from possessing firearms," Winkler said. He added that as the court looks back into history for gun laws, they have to decide how to examine racist gun legislation from the past.

The court, Winkler said, must consider: "Is that law evidence that [the] government has the power to ban dangerous people from possessing firearms, because people thought that African Americans and other racial minorities were dangerous?"

One member of the Supreme Court, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, has already foreshadowed how she might approach the felon-in-possession statute. While she was a judge on the 7th Circuit in 2020, Barrett argued in a dissenting opinion that, based on history, the legislature only has the power to prevent "dangerous" people from owning guns — not anyone previously convicted of a felony.

Barrett's proposal would call for a case-by-case analysis rather than a categorical ban.