Supreme Court to hear first major Second Amendment case in a decade

[middlefinger]

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The Supreme Court on Monday accepted for argument a New York Second Amendment case, the first major gun rights case in a decade.



The court accepted the case in an unsigned order, noting that the justice will only consider only "whether the state's denial of petitioners' applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment."

The first case arose out of a dispute over New York licensing. As it stands, New York law requires applicants for a license to demonstrate *proper cause* and *special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.* But several New York residents, as well as the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, pushed back, arguing that such rules were unconstitutional.

Lower courts ruled in favor of the New York law before the case reached the Supreme Court. The court has not delivered a significant Second Amendment ruling since 2010. In 2019, however, the court took up a case addressing New York City firearm transport restrictions. But the court tossed the case last year after the city changed its regulations.

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/n...s&rid=19492841

[PickingPA]

As it stands, New York law requires applicants for a license to demonstrate *proper cause* and *special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession*.

Not only a Second Amendment case, but if argued properly the bolded part of the law also violates the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment

[cdi]

The powers that be can not afford to have the court rule in our favor on this.
Prediction: 5-4 decision against.

[mikelets456]

The powers that be can not afford to have the court rule in our favor on this.
Prediction: 5-4 decision against.

Are you stating 5-4 ruling against or for the state of NY? I don't trust SCOTUS, especially their last few rulings and couple that with the ninth circuit's latest ruling on carry in public. I do believe Alito, Gorsuch, Thomas and Kavanaugh will support the right to bear arms. I'm not sure what ACB will do---This will reveal their true colors. It's an obvious ruling and if they strictly went by the constitution it would be a 9-0 vote. But sadly, I don't believe it will. Maybe they'll do the wimp thing and kick it back to the states.
I don't believe states can simply trample on the Bill of Rights ---just because, but that's just me.

[EFK]

Frankly I think it has the potential to do irreparable harm to the 2A and I agree, I no longer have any faith in SCOTUS to stick to the plain language of the Constitution. A positive (from my perspective) ruling will affect NY and probably a handful of other socialist states; maybe CA, NJ, MA etc. A negative ruling will likely affect ALL of us, as it will be trumpeted from the rooftops by CNN and their ilk and will embolden the current occupiers of our gov't to push harder and further for more restrictions.

[PAMedic=F|A=]

Supreme Court agrees to decide whether gun owners have right to carry a weapon in public
Mon, April 26, 2021, 9:33 AM
The Supreme Court is seen as morning fog lingers on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2020. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
The Supreme Court is seen as morning fog lingers on Capitol Hill in Washington in October 2020. (AP)
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a major gun-rights claim and decide whether the 2nd Amendment gives law-abiding individuals a right to carry a loaded handgun when they leave home, regardless of local restrictions.

At issue are laws in California, New York and six other states that strictly limit "concealed carry" permits to those who can show they have a "special need" or "good cause" to be armed. In Los Angeles, New York and other cities, these permits are rarely granted.

"The time has come for this court to... reaffirm the citizens* fundamental right to carry a handgun for self-defense," Washington attorney Paul D. Clement said in his appeal on behalf of the New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn.

The case could be the most significant test of the 2nd Amendment in a decade. In 2008, the court ruled for the first time that the Constitution gives individuals a right to have a gun for self-defense, and it struck down a Washington, D.C., ordinance that prohibited all private possession of handguns. Two years later, the court threw out a similar handgun ban in Chicago.

Since then, the justices have steadily turned away appeals that challenged other gun laws, including measures that limited who could obtain a license to carry a gun in public. But the three newest justices * all Trump appointees * have indicated in the past they favor stronger protections for gun rights under the 2nd Amendment.

California law says gun owners may apply for a concealed-carry permit with a local law enforcement agency, and one may be granted if a sheriff or police chief determines the applicant is of "good moral character" and has "good cause" to carry a loaded handgun.

The Los Angeles Police Department says, "good cause exists if there is convincing evidence of a clear and present danger to life or of bodily harm" to applicants or their families.

"Because of the restrictive practices in some California cities and counties, the most recent data show that there are only 120,582 concealed carry license holders in all of California. That is a mere 0.39% of the adult population of California," the court was told by several law enforcement groups, including the California Sheriffs Assn.

In New York, about 1.2% adults hold "carry" licenses. By contrast, the neighboring state of Pennsylvania has a "shall issue" policy to give permits to eligible residents who apply, and about 14% of its adults have a license to carry a weapon, the group said. They said 28% of Alabama adults have carry permits, the highest percentage in the nation.

The other states with the more restrictive "may issue" policies are Hawaii, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Delaware and Rhode Island.

The New York case began when Robert Nash and Brandon Koch, who live near Albany, applied for a concealed carry permit. Nash cited "a string of recent robberies in his neighborhood." But both were turned down because they "did not demonstrate a special need for self-defense that distinguished [them] from the general public.*

They sued along with the state rifle association claiming a violation of their rights under the 2nd Amendment. They lost before a federal judge and the 2nd Circuit Court, which held the state may restrict who carries a concealed weapon in public.

The court will hear arguments in the fall in the case of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Corlett.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/supreme-c...133339467.html

[PAMedic=F|A=]

The Supreme Court will hear a major Second Amendment case that could gut US gun laws
The Supreme Court could make the NRA’s dreams come true.

Ian MillhiserApr 26, 2021, 9:31am EDT

Trump-appointed Justices (from left) Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, and Neil Gorsuch.
Alex Wong/Getty Images
The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Corlett, a case that could transform the judiciary’s understanding of the Second Amendment and lay waste to many of the nation’s gun laws.

The case involves New York state’s handgun licensing law — a law that has been in place since 1913 — which requires someone who wishes to carry a handgun in public to demonstrate “proper cause” in order to obtain a license permitting them to do so.

Proper cause can be demonstrated in several ways. Someone who wishes to use a gun for hunting or target practice may obtain a license permitting them to do so, although this type of license can be restricted to only allow the bearer to use their gun for these purposes. People in certain kinds of work may also obtain licenses — a storekeeper might be issued a limited license allowing them to keep a gun in their store for protection, for example, or a bank messenger may be allowed to carry a gun to protect themselves and the money they transport.

But to obtain an unrestricted license to carry, New York courts have established that an applicant must “demonstrate a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.” So someone might be able to obtain a license because they have a particular fear of their stalker — but someone who merely wants to carry a gun, because of a general belief that it would be useful if they are ever the victim of a violent crime, cannot obtain a license.

The plaintiffs in Corlett include a New York state gun rights group and two New York men who applied for a license to carry a handgun in public and were denied that license. They claim that “law-abiding citizens” have a Second Amendment right to carry a gun in public — and the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, could agree with them.

Indeed, Corlett could potentially dismantle more than a decade of judicial decisions interpreting the Second Amendment, imposing prohibitive limits on lawmakers’ ability to reduce gun violence.

In fairness, there is one early sign that the Court may be inclined to place some limits on its decision in Corlett. Although the plaintiffs asked the Court to rule on a broad question — “whether the Second Amendment allows the government to prohibit ordinary law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns outside the home for self-defense” — the justices announced on Monday that they will only resolve a more narrow question: “whether the State’s denial of petitioners’ applications for concealed-carry licenses for self-defense violated the Second Amendment.”

Nevertheless, this narrower question is still broad enough to allow the Supreme Court to rewrite a decade of Second Amendment precedents, to unwind a consensus within the lower courts that permits many gun regulations to stand, and then to allow those lower courts to complete the process of dismantling other gun laws.

How the Supreme Court’s current precedents approach the Second Amendment

The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” and until fairly recently, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of this amendment very seriously. As the Court explained in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. Thus, the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.”

But the Supreme Court largely abandoned this approach in its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, holding for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to bear arms.

While Heller marked a sea change in the Court’s approach to the Second Amendment, it was also a heavily caveated victory for gun rights advocates. Among other things, Heller suggests that bans on “carrying concealed weapons” are lawful, as are “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” or bans on “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

Additionally, while Heller struck down the District of Columbia’s “absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” the opinion is much less clear about gun rights outside the home.

Since Heller, the Supreme Court has largely been silent about the scope of the Second Amendment, handing down only one significant Second Amendment decision, McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010). That case merely held that states, and not just the federal government, are bound by the Second Amendment’s restrictions on gun laws — whatever those restrictions may be.

And yet, while the Supreme Court has largely stayed out of the business of interpreting the Second Amendment since Heller, a clear consensus has emerged in the lower courts regarding how to interpret that amendment — even though this consensus is not shared by many key members of the Supreme Court.

The consensus approach to the Second Amendment, briefly explained

In the absence of more guidance from the Supreme Court on how to apply the Heller decision, lower federal courts have largely coalesced around the same basic approach to Second Amendment cases.

At least 10 federal appeals courts apply what federal appellate Judge Stephen Higginson describes as a “two-step analytic framework.” Under this framework, “severe burdens on core Second Amendment rights” are subject to “strict scrutiny,” the most skeptical level of review in most constitutional cases. Meanwhile, “less onerous laws, or laws that govern conduct outside of the Second Amendment’s ‘core,’” are subject to a more permissive test known as “intermediate scrutiny.”

Under this consensus framework, gun regulations that impose very serious restrictions on “core” Second Amendment rights — which Higginson described as the right of “law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home” that the Court recognized in Heller, but may also include some guns rights that were historically considered important — will typically be struck down, while less severe restrictions or gun laws that don’t burden the Second Amendment’s “core” are more likely to be upheld.

In 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit applied this framework to the gun licensing regime at issue in the Corlett case, and it upheld that regime. In an opinion by George W. Bush appointee Judge Richard Wesley, the Second Circuit explained that there is a long tradition of laws in the United States that prevent people from carrying guns outside of their homes.

“During the Founding Era,” Wesley wrote, “many states prohibited the use of firearms on certain occasions and in certain locations.” North Carolina, for example, forbade “going armed at night or day ‘in fairs, markets, nor in the presence of the King’s Justices, or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere.’” In the 19th century, Georgia and Tennessee banned outright the sale of weapons, such as handguns, that could be concealed. And New York’s own licensing regime is more than a century old.

In light of this history, the Second Circuit concluded that “state regulation of the use of firearms in public was ‘enshrined with[in] the scope’ of the Second Amendment when it was adopted,” and thus a licensing regime for people who want to carry firearms in public did not fall within the core of the Second Amendment.

Why the consensus approach is in danger

While lower court judges have largely embraced the “two-step analytic framework” applied by most circuits, there have been a few dissenters. One dissenter is Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who argued in a 2011 dissenting opinion, when he was still a lower court judge, that the consensus approach should be abandoned. “Courts are to assess gun bans and regulations based on text, history, and tradition,” Kavanaugh claimed, “not by a balancing test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny.”

In that 2011 case, Kavanaugh would have struck down a law banning semi-automatic assault weapons and requiring gun owners to register their firearms.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, meanwhile, also called for a stricter Second Amendment when she was a lower court judge. Recall that Heller suggested that “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill” are constitutional. But, dissenting in Kantor v. Barr (2019), Barrett claimed that this rule should be shrunk so that only “dangerous people” may be prohibited from owning a gun. So under Barrett’s framework, a person convicted of a nonviolent felony like mail fraud would still have a Second Amendment right to own a gun.

There’s also a third reason to suspect that the Supreme Court is likely to use the Corlett case to move the law dramatically to the right.

Shortly before his death in 2019, retired Justice John Paul Stevens revealed some of the internal deliberations behind the Supreme Court’s Heller decision. After former Justice Antonin Scalia, the author of Heller, circulated his original draft to the Court, former Justice Anthony Kennedy asked for “some important changes” to that draft.

Because Heller was a 5-4 decision, Scalia needed Kennedy’s vote to hold onto his majority. According to Stevens, it was Kennedy who requested that the opinion include language stating that Heller “should not be taken to cast doubt” on many existing gun laws.

But Kennedy retired from the Supreme Court in 2018 and was replaced by Kavanaugh. And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who joined the dissent in Heller, died in 2020 and was replaced by Barrett.

The current Court, in other words, is much more conservative than the Court that decided Heller in 2008. It’s not even clear that a majority of the current Court supports the portions of Heller that limit the scope of the Second Amendment — much less the kind of analysis that led the Second Circuit to uphold New York’s gun licensing law.

The future of gun control in the United States could be quite grim — and Corlett could mark the moment when lawmakers’ power to fight gun violence falls apart.

https://www.vox.com/2021/4/26/223641...anaugh-barrett

[EFK]

Wow. Not surprising, but the author of the Vox-sourced article linked above is glaringly biased. Frankly it should be considered an 'opinion piece' as opposed to journalism.

Edit: oh, I see they (Vox) describe their 'work' as "explanatory journalism."

Just call it what it is: propaganda.

[pa350z]

Gunlawyer has said in the past that it was best this never made it to the SCOTUS. This decision will be huge no matter what side it comes down on. Can't even begin to predict. I find it amazing that some seemingly random lawyers arguing in favor of striking down the New York law(s) will be making the case for the whole Country! Hoping he/she is the best there is in appearing for and making arguments before the Court.

[PickingPA]

Gunlawyer has said in the past that it was best this never made it to the SCOTUS. This decision will be huge no matter what side it comes down on. Can't even begin to predict. I find it amazing that some lawyers arguing in favor of striking down the New York law(s) will be making the case for the whole Country! Hoping he/she is the best there is in appearing for and making arguments before the Court.