Supreme Court Agrees to Examine New York City Gun Rules
By Brent Kendall and Jess Bravin
The Wall Street Journal
January 22, 2019
WASHINGTON—The Supreme Court on Tuesday accepted its first major Second Amendment case in a decade, a challenge to New York City regulations prohibiting most licensed handgun owners from taking their weapons outside their residences except to local shooting ranges and other designated locations.
The case, to be heard in the 2019-20 term that begins in October, offers gun-rights activists their first opportunity to expand the constitutional right to weapons beyond a pair of landmark decisions that, beginning in 2008, for the first time found the Second Amendment allows individuals to keep handguns in the home for self-defense.
The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association and other gun owners, represented by high-profile conservative attorneys, contend the Constitution also entitles them to bring their handguns—locked and unloaded—to second homes, target ranges or shooting competitions outside the city.
A federal appeals court upheld the restrictions, citing the city’s public-safety interests, including the need to control the presence of firearms in public.
Since the court’s prior Second Amendment opinions, gun-rights activists have brought myriad challenges to state and city weapons regulations in the federal courts. But most of those measures have been upheld and the Supreme Court, to the public frustration of its most conservative members, has declined to review those decisions.
Tuesday’s action, issued without noted dissent, will put the divisive issue of weapons access front and center just as the 2020 election season, expected to pit pro-gun President Trump against Democrats calling for tighter controls, gets under way.
The case will put a spotlight on the court’s newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, whose expansive view of gun rights while a lower-court judge came into focus during confirmation hearings last fall. In 2011, while serving on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, then-Judge Kavanaugh dissented from an opinion upholding a D.C. law prohibiting semiautomatic rifles it classified as “assault weapons” within city limits and barring large-capacity ammunition magazines.
The majority opinion by Judge Douglas Ginsburg—a conservative once nominated for the Supreme Court by President Reagan—found the D.C. law a justifiable policy for “protecting police officers and controlling crime.” Judge Kavanaugh, however, wrote that “the Constitution disables the government from employing certain means to prevent, deter, or detect violent crime,” a position that helped inspire the National Rifle Association to back his confirmation last year with a major advertising campaign.
A spokesman for New York City’s Law Department said it looked forward to defending the city’s gun rule. “The city’s rule keeps us all safer by limiting public transport of handguns through our crowded streets while also allowing license holders fair opportunity to maintain proficiency in the use of their weapons,” the spokesman said.
2 comments:
Its about time.
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