You have not read the opinion and don’t understand how expansive it was. The NY law wasn’t the sole issue. This is from fox and one of the biggest anti gun “reporters”
The Supreme Court’s new gun ruling means virtually no gun regulation is safe
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is a devastating decision for anyone who cares about reducing gun violence.
It massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the
overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — are likely to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”
The case involves a 109-year-old New York state law which requires anyone who wishes to carry a handgun in public, whether openly or concealed, to
demonstrate “proper cause” before they can obtain a license to do so. An applicant must show “a
special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.”
Similar laws
exist in five other states — California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New Jersey — plus the District of Columbia. Together, these jurisdictions make up about a quarter of the US population, and a much higher percentage of the country’s urban population. In effect, that has meant very few residents of those states have been able to legally carry a handgun in public.
Writing solely for the Court’s Republican appointees, Justice Clarence Thomas strikes down New York’s century-old law. He also establishes a whole new (confusing) framework for evaluating gun control laws. Bruen establishes a “text, history, and tradition test” that purports to be rooted in, well, the text of the Constitution, and the history of English and early American gun laws.
In reality, however, Thomas’s new test takes extraordinary liberties with the
text of the Second Amendment, which explicitly states that the purpose of the right to bear arms is to protect service in a militia.
And when it comes to “history,” “the Court’s near-exclusive reliance on history is not only unnecessary, it is deeply impractical,” as Breyer chastises Thomas in dissent. That’s because judges are ill-equipped to conduct the kind of multi-century historical survey that Thomas’s new framework demands.
Worse, Thomas announces that the government bears the burden of showing that any gun law “is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” But if “tradition” is so important, why must New York’s 100-year-old law fall? As a practical matter, moreover, that Thomas places the burden of proof on the government means many gun laws are likely to fall because, when the historical record is unclear, the government loses.
![[rofl]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/013.gif "ROFL [rofl]")
![[rolleyes]](/xen/styles/default/xenforo/smilies.vb/042.gif "Roll Eyes [rolleyes]")
