The conservative leaning United States Supreme Court is expected to expand gun rights after a pair of horrific mass shootings in Buffalo N.Y and Uvalde, Texas, left more than two dozen people dead and reignited the debate over gun rights and public safety.
According to Insider, the court is expected to hand down a ruling in late June or early July on a New York gun-permit law that was enacted over a century ago.
This is the first major gun rights case the court has considered in 14 years. The last time was in 2008 in District of Columbia vs Heller in which a 5-4 majority ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep a gun in the home for self-defense. However, the decision noted gun ownership rights were “not unlimited” and does not translate to a “right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose”.
Before the court now is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen which challenges the more than a century old New York law that requires residents who want a license to carry a gun in public to demonstrate a “proper cause,” or a special reason, for doing so.
Two New York men claim the law violated their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms after they applied for state permits to carry a concealed gun in public for self-defense purposes and were denied because they did not meet the “proper cause” standard.
The conservative justices appeared to side with the challengers that the law is unconstitutional during oral arguments in November.
“Why isn’t it good enough to say I live in a violent area, and I want to be able to defend myself?” Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked, according to Insider.
Justice Samuel Alito wondered why criminals could walk around New York City with their illegal guns “but the ordinary hardworking, law-abiding people” couldn’t be armed.
Observers expect that the law will be struck down leaving lawmakers with fewer options for regulating firearms.
“At least until now, the scope of gun regulation has been primarily a question for politics and we decide collectively the degree and the ways in which we want to regulate. The Second Amendment puts some outside limits on that, but the Supreme Court has repeatedly reiterated that the Second Amendment permits various forms of gun regulation, and in the [New York] case, the court seems likely to restrict the available policy space, so we will probably have fewer options,” Joseph Blocher, a law professor at Duke who co-directs the Duke Center for Firearms Law told The Hill.
If the law is struck down its impact will not just be felt in New York. Seven other states — California, Massachusetts, Delaware, Maryland, New Jersey, Rhode Island, and Hawaii–have similar concealed carry laws like New York that would likely be struck down by the ruling.
That outcome would mean more guns will be brought into public spaces which would likely result in more crimes.
“We already know more guns equals more crime and we have an awful raft of mass shootings – gun homicides have spiked in the last couple of years,” Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law said. “We have a major gun violence problem and expanding Second Amendment protections, greater than they already are, is likely to make it much harder for lawmakers to enact effective laws to reduce gun violence.”
