Every psycho wingnut will be armed
As predicted, the Supremes struck down New York’s decades long concealed carry law. The 6-3 super majority says that people have a right to carry guns outside the home whenever they damned well please. Great.
The Supreme Court struck down New York state’s system for issuing concealed weapons permits, ruling that the century-old law requiring that applicants demonstrate “proper cause” and “good moral character” violates the Second Amendment.
The 6-3 decision in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, marks the widest expansion of gun rights since 2010, when the court applied nationwide a 2008 ruling establishing an individual right of armed self-defense within the home. It puts in question similar laws in at least eight other states and the District of Columbia, where authorities hold substantial discretion over issuing concealed-weapons permits.
“The Second and 14th Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote for the court. New York law requiring that applicants justify their need for a concealed weapons permit thus was unconstitutional.
The ruling came on the same day Senate Democrats and more than a dozen Republicans were set to advance bipartisan gun control legislation past its last procedural hurdle, setting up a final passage for as soon as Friday on the biggest firearms legislation in decades.
The Supreme Court’s decision swept further than the rules for concealed-weapons permits. The court rejected the legal method overwhelmingly used by lower courts to evaluate gun regulations, which has considered such government’s interests as crime prevention. Under that standard, most weapons laws have been upheld since the Supreme Court first recognized an individual right under the Second Amendment in its 2008 decision on District of Columbia v. Heller and a subsequent ruling in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010.
Instead, Justice Thomas wrote Thursday, a weapons law is constitutional only if the government demonstrates “that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett joined the opinion.
Under that standard—previously asserted in dissenting opinions by Justices Kavanaugh and Barrett when they sat on lower courts—gun advocates believe more regulations will fall, allowing greater access to weapons and ammunition nationwide.
A 52-page dissent by Justice Stephen Breyer began bluntly. “In 2020, 45,222 Americans were killed by firearms,” he wrote, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. History alone shouldn’t govern the Second Amendment’s application, he wrote, for “it is constitutionally proper, indeed often necessary… to consider the serious dangers and consequences of gun violence that lead States to regulate firearms.”
They say that we have to rely on whether or not people historically carried guns for self-defense in the 18th and 19th century. Great. They literally want to turn 21st century cities into the wild west.