The United States Supreme Court, on June 23, issued a truly monumental ruling that overruled a 109-year-old New York gun law that positioned constraints on bearing a concealed firearm outside of the house. upholding and strengthening the legal defenses of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution.
“In 43 States, the government issues licenses to carry based on objective criteria. But in six States, including New York, the government further conditions issuance of a license to carry on a citizen’s showing of some additional special need,” said Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6-3 majority. “Because the State of New York issues public-carry licenses only when an applicant demonstrates a special need for self-defense, we conclude that the State’s licensing regime violates the Constitution.”
For more than a century, New York has actually made it a crime for anybody to bring a hidden gun without a license. The state changed the law so that magistrates might provide a hidden bring license just if that individual showed to have “good moral character” and “proper cause” — both subjective requirements..
The case before the Court, New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen, included that state requirement. Two gun owners challenged the law as unconstitutional after they were barred from carrying a gun in public.
“Why isn’t it good enough to say, I live in a violent area and I want to be able to defend myself?” asked Justice Brett Kavanaugh during oral arguments. “That’s the real concern, isn’t it, with any constitutional right, if it’s the discretion of an individual officer, that seems inconsistent with an objective constitutional right.”
This was the Court’s very first judgment on a Second Amendment case given that District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. At that time, the Court held that the Fourteenth and 2nd Amendments safeguard the right of an obedient resident to have a gun in the house. The issue on which the Court ruled today worried whether a person has a right to carry pistols openly for self-defense.
“We too agree, and now hold, consistent with Heller and McDonald, that the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” Justice Thomas wrote.
The opinion stated:
“If the last decade of Second Amendment litigation has taught this Court anything, it is that federal courts tasked with making such difficult empirical judgments regarding firearm regulations under the banner of ‘intermediate scrutiny’ often defer to the determinations of legislatures. But while that judicial deference to legislative interest balancing is understandable—and, elsewhere, appropriate—it is not deference that the Constitution demands here. The Second Amendment ‘is the very product of an interest balancing by the people’ and it ‘surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms’ for self-defense.
The judgment might have an effect on just recently proposed Congressional gun control legislation, in addition to pending cases in any of the six “may issue” states that, till today, still had laws requiring a petitioner to reveal “proper cause” in order to qualify for a concealed carry license.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the ruling is “frightful in its scope of how they are setting back this nation and our ability to protect our citizens.”
She continued:
“It is outrageous that at a moment of national reckoning on gun violence, the Supreme Court has recklessly struck down a New York law that limits those who can carry concealed weapons. … Does everyone understand what a concealed weapon means? That you have no forewarning that someone can hide a weapon on them and go into our subways. Go into our grocery stores like stores up in Buffalo New York run from going to a school in Parkland or Uvalde. This could place millions of New Yorkers in harm’s way,”
Additional Takeaways:
Justice Thomas, writing for the majority annihilated the ‘musket argument’ that the Second Amendment cannot apply to modern weapons.
“We have already recognized in Heller at least one way in which the Second Amendment’s historically fixed meaning applies to new circumstances: Its reference to “arms” does not apply “only [to] those arms in existence in the 18th century.” 554 U. S., at 582. “Just as the First Amendment protects modern forms of communications, and the Fourth Amendment applies to modern forms of search, the Second Amendment extends, prima facie, to all instruments that constitute bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding.” Ibid. (citations omitted). Thus, even though the Second Amendment’s definition of “arms” is fixed according to its historical understanding, that general definition covers modern instruments that facilitate armed self-defense. “
The Second Amendment makes no distinction between bearing arms in the home versus bearing arms in public so limitation to the home is unconsitutional.
“Nothing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms, and the definition of “bear” naturally encompasses public carry.”
The ‘Hunting argument’ that the Second Amendment was intended for hunting and sport shooting (which was already refuted in DC v. Heller) has been officially killed for a SECOND TIME. The ‘Militia’ argument is also destroyed by the recognition of INDIVIDUAL self-defense as “‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.”
“As we stated in Heller and repeated in McDonald, “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.”
H/T Timcast
