It’s a cliché to say so, but these regulations bother only the most law-abiding people in the state.
It’s a cliché to say so, but these regulations bother only the most law-abiding people in the state.
D id we get only two months and a week of the Second Amendment in New York State? On June 23, the Supreme Court overturned New York’s laws that required residents seeking a permit to carry a firearm outside of their homes to “demonstrate a special need for protection.”
It seemed intuitive for years that the Founders could not have meant that the Second Amendment allows individuals only to buy a firearm and then do nothing with it but wait for a home invasion between periodic visits to a shooting range, unless that person could demonstrate that they were, say, a jewelry-store owner who carried lots of cash between the store and a local bank. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the majority, confirmed over many pages that this intuition had a solid basis in history, tradition, and law.
From the decision:
The Court has little difficulty concluding also that the plain text of the Second Amendment protects . . . carrying handguns publicly for self-defense. 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. Moreover, the Second Amendment guarantees an “individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” id., at 592, and confrontation can surely take place outside the home. Pp. 23–24.
But in the following weeks, New York passed a series of laws meant to replace the old qualifications. And, particularly, in New York City, those carry-permit holders who qualified under the old system are now finding themselves disqualified because their shop is in a special protected zone, or because they use public transport or frequently pass through public parks. Typically when New Yorkers want to protect themselves, it’s the parks and subways they are thinking about.
Instead of providing a “letter of good cause” showing the reason you want a gun, now you must complete a longer course of firearms-safety training and demonstrate “good moral character.” Across the state, this includes sharing with law-enforcement officers “a list of former and current social media accounts” from the past three years so they can assess your “character and conduct.”
Basically, New York decided to add a First Amendment violation as a bit of sauce to flavor the violation of the Second Amendment. The law is clumsily crafted. It’s not entirely clear whether I would be committing a crime if I forgot to include a LinkedIn account that I had not used for three years but that did exist in the past three years. It’s not clear whether law enforcement could disqualify carry permits based on content from five years ago. Could my overheated remarks about Jesuits or the pope disqualify me? There is no guidance.
The Court didn’t address all the other bizarre things about gun laws in New York — namely that the regulations make it harder to fire many commonly used rifles safely, what with the anti-ergonomic “fin grips” and the ban on muzzle devices and silencers that protect shooters and those around them from excessive noise and hot released gases.
And the new legislation also imposes all sorts of other burdens, such as gun stores recording all the details about ammo you purchase, or fanciful requirements that may not even be technologically possible, such as a potential future requirement that gunmakers use micro stamping to make fired ammunition traceable to the gun.
It’s a cliché to say so, but these regulations bother only the most law-abiding people in the state. Almost all gun crimes in New York are committed by people who illegally possess their firearms, and law enforcement estimates that over 100,000 illegal guns are floating around New York City alone.
The effect of these laws has been to cause a huge increase in applications for carry licenses, from people afraid of even more restrictions in the future. And it’s also driving up the sale of semi-automatic firearms that take shotgun cartridges. These Shockwave-style weapons can be quite fun to shoot, but they are far more violent and arguably more dangerous in the average gun owner’s hands than the AR-15 that is so regulated in the state.
My colleague Charles C. W. Cooke has often proposed a set of amendments to the Constitution — just the phrase “And we mean it” written over and over again after every provision. We need a similar declaration from the courts that the most properly small-r republican amendment applies even in the Empire State.