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CityAndStateNY.com
May 30, 2022
Walking backward on gun control The U.S. Supreme Court could soon gut New York’s concealed carry law. Here’s how the state could respond.
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NE DAY AFTER a man in Texas gunned down 19 school children and two adults, a week and a half after 10 people were shot and killed in a grocery story in a Black neighborhood in Buffalo, and six weeks after New Yorkers’ morning commute was interrupted by a mass shooting on the subway, New York City Mayor Eric Adams pleaded with the U.S. Supreme Court not to roll back one of the state’s major gun control laws. “I’m hoping the Supreme Court re-deliberates, thinks differently,” Adams said at a press conference on May 25, referring to the state law that maintains a strict standard for who can carry a concealed firearm in public. But some legal experts said that even in the wake of these and other deadly shootings, it’s likely that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority will claw back all or parts of the New York law, leading to more people walking around with concealed weapons. “We’re now in an age in which the court is heavily polarized along party lines. Thirty years ago, this kind of event could have made a difference,” said Scott Lemieux, a political science professor at the University of Washington, of the mass
shooting at a Texas elementary school. “The reality is that there is pretty strong opposition among Republican elites to gun control. If Sandy Hook didn’t change that, if the Orlando shooting didn’t change that, it just seems unlikely that this is going to do it.” The case in question is New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which the Supreme Court is expected to hand down a decision on by the end of June. At the center of the case is New York state’s century-old law requiring that anyone wishing to carry a firearm in public must obtain a license to do so and demonstrate “proper cause” to carry the weapon. A court later defined “proper cause” as a heightened need for self-protection. The case involves two Rensselaer County residents who applied for unrestricted licenses to carry handguns for self-defense, but who were only granted restricted licenses to carry them in specific settings, including hunting and target shooting. The residents, backed by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association – an affiliate of the National Rifle Association – are seeking to overturn the “proper cause” requirement, arguing that it’s unconstitutional under the Second and 14th Amendments.
Questions from Supreme Court justices during oral arguments made in the case in November left some observers doubtful that New York’s law would survive, at least in its current form. “It seems like there’s a majority of the Supreme Court who is skeptical about the constitutionality of New York’s restriction,” said Eric Ruben, an assistant professor at Southern Methodist University’s Dedman School of Law and a fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice. Chief Justice John Roberts compared the Second Amendment to the protections in the First Amendment. “You don’t have to say, when you’re looking for a permit to speak on a street corner or whatever, that, you know, your speech is particularly important,” Roberts said in November. “So why do you have to show in this case, convince somebody, that you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?” Though New York is preparing for the law to be overturned, legal experts said there may be steps the state can take to maintain some restrictions on who can carry a weapon in public. It all depends on the specifics of the court’s opinion. In a more narrow ruling, the court could strike down the “proper cause” standard, in which case state lawmakers would have
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By Annie McDonough
