Supreme Court gun ruling

The high court's ruling struck down the century-old law mandating that gun owners demonstrate "proper cause" to carry a concealed handgun outside of their homes ...

This ruling brings life-saving justice to law-abiding Americans who have lived under unconstitutional regimes all across our country, particularly in cities and states with revolving door criminal justice systems, no cash bail and increased harassment of law-enforcement," NRA chief Wayne LaPierre said in a statement. By wrongly issuing this decision, and ignoring its public safety implications, the Supreme Court risks converting the Constitution into a suicide pact..." As we face rising gun violence across the country, this decision will only make it harder to protect New Yorkers from dangerous weapons in our communities," added Rep. Mondaire Jones, D-N.Y. Those efforts will include a comprehensive review of our approach to defining 'sensitive locations' where carrying a gun is banned, and reviewing our application process to ensure that only those who are fully qualified can obtain a carry license," he said in a statement. "In response to this ruling, we are closely reviewing our options -- including calling a special session of the legislature," she added. "I urge states to continue to enact and enforce commonsense laws to make their citizens and communities safer from gun violence."

The Senate passes a gun control bill and sends it to the House. The Supreme Court strikes down New York's law restricting concealed carrying of guns.

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On Thursday, a conservative majority struck down a hundred-and-eleven-year-old gun law restricting the ability to carry handguns outside of the home.

Just a few days ago, Hochul signed a package of new gun-control laws—including raising the minimum age for buying an AR-15-type rifle from eighteen to twenty-one—in response to the racist mass shooting in Buffalo. New York has been one of the few states able to pass robust gun-control measures in response to mass shootings in recent years, and now its lawmakers will be tasked with coming up with a replacement for the Sullivan Act. This will likely include declaring public spaces such as schools and hospitals “sensitive spaces” where guns are barred, even for those with permits. When asked, on Thursday, whether New York City’s subways would qualify as “sensitive spaces,” Hochul replied, “In my opinion, they are.” Big Tim didn’t know what the consequences of the Sullivan Act would be when he proposed it, more than a century ago. By comparing mortality rates in New York with rates in other states before and after the implementation of the Sullivan Act, Depew and Swensen found that gun suicides in New York fell by thirty-two to forty-eight per cent. v. Bruen was brought on behalf of Robert Nash and Brandon Koch, two men in Rensselaer County, near Albany, who objected to a later amendment to the Sullivan Act that allows local officials a degree of discretion in deciding who qualifies for a permit to carry a concealed weapon in public. Much of the focus in the debate will surely be on New York City, which saw a spike in shootings last year, and where arguments about crime and violence have lately been dominating the city’s interior monologue. Within minutes of the ruling’s release, Governor Kathy Hochul, who called the ruling “shocking” and “frightful in its scope,” announced that she would call a special session of the state legislature, likely in the next few weeks, to respond. Something like this appears to have happened in New York State. In 2019, Briggs Depew and Isaac D. Swensen, researchers at Utah State University and Montana State University, published a study examining the effects of the Sullivan Act, a hundred-and-eleven-year-old New York law that established the state’s gun-permitting rules. Both men had applied for concealed-carry licenses and been denied, because local officials determined that neither had demonstrated “proper cause” for needing the license for self-defense. v. Bruen, the big gun case that the Supreme Court decided on Thursday. In a 6–3 decision, the Court ruled that a specific New York State gun-control law is unconstitutional. Within months, Big Tim Sullivan, a Tammany Hall boss and state senator, pushed through a measure that would soon become a model for gun-control legislation around the country. “Does the dissent think that a lot of people who possess guns in their homes will be stopped or deterred from shooting themselves if they cannot lawfully take them outside?” Alito asks, rhetorically. Although the study found that the act “had no clear effects on homicide or suicide rates,” there was “clear evidence” that it had led to a large decrease in gun-related suicide rates.

In a 6-3 ruling, the Supreme Court reversed New York's 108-year-old gun law regarding who can obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun in public.

"How will they know whether this is someone who has an illegal gun about to go commit a crime versus someone who may have the concealed carry license? We have a right to protect our citizens, not take away your right to own." "To think that someone would be able to do this on a subway, in a crowded, you know, tense situation during rush hour, no, no.

Licensed firearm owners who want to carry their weapons in public will still need to apply for a concealed carry permit, and this process can involve background ...

The precinct’s officers did recently succeed in arresting a pickpocket suspected of a number of recent larcenies though he has not remained behind bars. The precinct has also been hit by an increase in auto-related thefts, a similar dynamic as was described at last week’s 24th Precinct Council meeting. Moreover, Officer McGuire noted that the majority of gun violence crimes are committed with unregistered illegal weapons and the NYPD will continue to fight that scourge. We have some of the strictest gun laws in the country and the NYPD will enforce those” he said. Captain Myrie evoked the specter of Bernard Goetz from 1984 and noted that most civilians do not have the training in threat assessment and conflict de-escalation needed to safely intervene with firearms. 47 in the same period last year according to NYPD CompStat data.

Errol Louis writes that New York officials at every level of government will be challenged in trying to craft gun regulations that fall within the bounds of ...

And the notion that we'll all feel better if we just think the person who's walking towards us on the street might be carrying a weapon, that that will all make us feel more secure unless we are packing ourselves -- I don't think that rings very true to most New York City residents, irrespective of their political views." "New York City in 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, had 33,000 people in it. And the Supreme Court allowed for the possibility that states can designate special areas -- like Times Square or the World Trade Center -- where guns would be flat-out prohibited. It will likely include people convicted of felonies, dishonorably discharged from the military, or found to be mentally infirm -- criteria that New York was already using before the Bruen decision. "We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need," Thomas writes. Despite the density of people, the Big Apple annually ranks among the safest cities in America

The ruling struck down New York's gun licensing laws and similar laws in California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and the District of Columbia ...

Unlike those rights, the opinion says the right to carry weapons may be limited only to "law-abiding, responsible citizens." Bruen says that there is a "constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense." Officials in the states affected by the ruling have said they are planning to rewrite their laws along those lines. New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy said he will seek legislation banning guns in such places as bars, arenas, hospitals and government buildings. Since 2005, the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act has provided near blanket immunity for gun makers and dealers from liability for crimes committed with their products. Register now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com

The Bruen ruling is actually a reasonable one, of limited scope. It should permit substantial gun regulations without endangering individual gun ownership. The ...

If gun control is as popular with Americans as advocates argue, they shouldn’t have a hard time crafting an amendment that would overturn the court’s rulings and give states and cities the gun-control powers advocates seek. Progressive and gun control advocates have a simple remedy if they don’t like the current court’s interpretation of the Second Amendment: Propose a new one. The New York state law that the court struck down required a person to show “special need” to obtain a license to carry a handgun in public for the purpose of self-defense. That type of dishonest interpretation of the Constitution is precisely what the conservative legal movement was formed to oppose. The court also implicitly allows states to ban the concealed carrying of firearms, including handguns. The court’s six-member majority held that the Second Amendment protects the individual right to bear arms as well as to keep them.

The Supreme Court decision which struck down a New York law placing restrictions on carrying a concealed gun outside the home will have drastic consequences ...

This is just another layer of difficulty for them because it's hard to understand who has a gun, who doesn't have a gun and then having people who are not trained." "And how can you not expect bad things to happen?" But the concern is if more people carry weapons, criminal offenders will be more emboldened to carry and use weapons illegally, making it even more difficult for police to identify them, Harrison added. "Then law enforcement will have to respond and try to de-escalate. In the widest expansion of gun rights in a decade, the court's decision Thursday changed the framework lower courts across the nation will use as they analyze other gun restrictions. This is a real concern, which the Supreme Court put in place."

The Supreme Court had a La Guardia moment on Thursday. Its mistake was foreshadowed in 2017, when Justice Clarence Thomas, joined in a dissent by Neil Gorsuch, ...

Readers express dismay over the justices' rejection of a New York gun law.

Don’t tell us to purchase and carry our own guns; that we will never do. The senators supporting the bipartisan gun control legislation that Congress passed this week acknowledge this fact. No law is 100 percent effective in preventing the behavior it is designed to regulate. At least as worrisome, the majority also ignored the reality of modern weapons and how they are used. To the Editor: To the Editor:

A protester wears a button reading I Heart NY Gun Laws. If District of Columbia v. Heller was a revolver, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is ...

In this case, though, the Second Amendment is being used to prevent them “from working out solutions to these problems through democratic processes.” The image of political discourse in Alito’s concurrence, and in more and more of this Court’s rulings, involves a lot of shouting, expressions of bitterness, and—rhetorically, at least—gun waving. (Gun violence is now the leading cause of death for American children ages one to eighteen.) Alito takes his concurrence to a singularly desolate place: Breyer, he writes, “appears not to understand” why Americans carry guns for self-defense; his answer, confoundingly, is that so many of their fellow-citizens are armed, too. As a result, Thomas fills page after page of the decision with increasingly strained rationalizations for why, as Breyer observes in his dissent, some laws “are too old. Perhaps the most important aspect of the decision is the test that Thomas lays out for deciding if a gun law is constitutional. Some were enacted for the wrong reasons.” After a recent year in which some forty-five thousand Americans died of gun-related injuries, six Justices have signed on to an opinion that explains that Henry VIII regulated handguns mostly because he worried that they “threatened Englishmen’s proficiency with the longbow.” The “historical tradition” in question seems to be a daydream about an imaginary land of guns. But the most unsettling concurrence is Samuel Alito’s, in large part because its main purpose seems to be to mock Breyer for including, in his dissent, facts about the role of guns in American life and death. And it focusses on the right to keep a gun in one’s residence; New York State Rifle now recognizes “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” The result will be more weapons in more public places. (Chief Justice John Roberts joined Kavanaugh’s concurrence.) Amy Coney Barrett also agreed in full, but wrote a brief concurrence to express her worry that, in future cases, too much weight would be placed on the nineteenth century, at the expense of the eighteenth. ( Ketanji Brown Jackson will join the Court after Breyer steps down at the end of the term.) In the New York State Rifle dissent, Breyer wonders what sort of gun-safety law could satisfy the Court’s conservatives, if New York’s couldn’t. “Sadly, I do not know the answer to that question,” Breyer wrote. If the Senate was the scene of a true breakthrough, the Court was the site of a major breakdown. Heller, changed the ground rules for gun laws by finding that the Constitution grants an individual right to gun ownership, rather than a right rooted in the Second Amendment’s notion of a “well regulated Militia.” Still, Heller left room for many gun laws and licensing requirements, such as those preventing felons from buying guns. The case concerns the license needed to carry a concealed handgun in New York. (There are looser rules for carrying a long gun.) Applicants had to show that they had “proper cause” to do so—that is, a specific self-defense concern.

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that a New York law requiring special circumstances to carry a gun in public was unconstitutional, which could impact ...

“Make no mistake: that means there will be more guns on our streets, and more guns in the hands of people who shouldn’t have them.” “And we will be litigating.” “I’ve been doing this a long time and this is about as clear as I’ve ever seen it,” Pennak said. For Pennak and Maryland Shall Issue, he said the work’s not done yet. “If the norm is that people can carry firearms, our neighborhoods, our streets and other public places will become more dangerous,” Frosh said in a statement. Under current Maryland law, a gun owner must prove that they have a “good and substantial reason” to carry a concealed weapon.