Recent precedents led to the U.S. Supreme Court's recent decision to overturn a New York state law that limited the public's ability to obtain concealed carry firearms permits.
Deciding for the plaintiff in New York State Rifle & Piston Assoc., Inc., v. Bruen, Superintendent of New York State Police, the Supreme Court invalidated a New York law that required applicants to demonstrate a need to possess a concealed carry permit.
Specifically, New York denied concealed carry permits to individuals named Brandon Koch and Robert Nash, claiming that they failed to satisfy the proper cause requirement. Koch and Nash arguing that the state law violated their Fourteenth and Second Amendment rights. A federal district court and federal court denied their petitions, relying on prior decision in Kachalsky v. County of Westchester, which had sustained New York's proper-cause standard. The district court said that the requirement was "substantially related to the achievement of an important governmental interest."
To overturn those decisions, the Supreme Court cited District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010) to affirm that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Because Heller specifies an individual's conduct relative to the Second Amendment (self-defense,) the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment protects the conduct of self defense.
In the decision's syllabus, the Supreme Court said that since Heller, appeals courts used a two-step framework for analyzing Second Amendment challenges that combines history with means-end scrutiny. The Supreme Court said that is one step too many.
According to the syllabus, "Step one is broadly consistent with Heller, which demands a test rooted in the Second Amendment's text, as informed by history. But Heller and McDonald do not support a second step that applies means-end scrutiny in the Second Amendment context. Heller's methodology ... did not invoke any means-end test such as strict or intermediate scrutiny, and it expressly rejected any interest-balancing inquiry akin to intermediate scrutiny."
In the following section, the syllabus makes an interesting editorial comment about judges lacking the background or qualifications necessary to "make difficult empirical judgments" about 'the costs and benefits of firearms restrictions,' especially given their 'lack [of] expertise' in the field."
Consequently, courts often defer to state legislatures in these sorts of cases. The Court said that is a mistake.
"While judicial deference to legislative interest balancing is understandable -- and, elsewhere, appropriate -- it is not deference that the Constitution demands here," the Court ruled. According to Heller, "The Second Amendment 'is the very product of an interest balancing by the people,' and it 'surely elevates above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms' for self-defense."
Gun control critics often say that the Second Amendment was written in the context of single-shot, muzzleloading firearms and that modern firearms like AR-15s require a more restrictive interpretation. The Court refuted that argument.
"Of course, the regulatory challenges posed by firearms today are not always the same as those that preoccupied the Founders in 1791 or the Reconstruction generation in 1868. But the Constitution can, and must, apply to circumstances beyond those the Founders specifically anticipated, even though its meaning is fixed according to the understandings of those who ratified it (United States v. Jones). Indeed, the Court recognized in Heller at least one way in which the Second Amendment's historically fixed meaning applies to new circumstances: Its reference to "arms" does not apply 'only [to] those arms in existence in the 18th century.' "
In the next section, the Court said that "individual self-defense is 'the central component' of the Second Amendment right."
The Court endorsed laws prohibiting firearms from sensitive places like schools and government buildings, but also said that a sensitive place designation cannot be assigned arbitrarily.
"Respondents' attempt to characterize New York's proper-cause requirement as a 'sensitive-place' law lacks merit because there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a 'sensitive place' simply because it is crowded."
Finally, and most important, the Court ruled that the respondent "failed to meet their burden to identify an American tradition justifying New York's proper-cause requirement."
Not that the respondent incorrectly identified a tradition, but that no such tradition exists.