Supreme Court says Second Amendment guarantees right to carry guns in public

related

Lily Allen: Women should not have to justify an abortion

https://www.standard.co.uk/showbiz/...tagram-roe-v-wade-supreme-court-b1009536.html

now she knows how New York handgun permit applicants feel

 

All they have done create a increase in vasectomies.
https://www.webmd.com/men/news/20220630/vasectomy-requests-increase-after-roe

 

Of Good Moral Character In New York

https://blog.simplejustice.us/2022/07/02/of-good-moral-character-in-new-york/

excerpt:

. . . But within the new law passed and signed in the night as New York is wont to do, are these additional requirements.

THE APPLICANT SHALL MEET IN PERSON WITH THE LICENSING OFFICER FOR AN INTERVIEW AND SHALL, IN ADDITION TO ANY OTHER INFORMATION OR FORMS REQUIRED BY THE LICENSE APPLICATION SUBMIT TO THE LICENSING OFFICER THE FOLLOWING INFORMATION: (I) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION FOR THE APPLICANT’S CURRENT SPOUSE, OR DOMESTIC PARTNER, ANY OTHER ADULTS RESIDING IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME, INCLUDING ANY ADULT CHILDREN OF THE APPLICANT, AND WHETHER OR NOT THERE ARE MINORS RESIDING, FULL TIME OR PART TIME, IN THE APPLICANT’S HOME; (II) NAMES AND CONTACT INFORMATION OF NO LESS THAN FOUR CHARACTER REFERENCES WHO CAN ATTEST TO THE APPLICANT’S GOOD MORAL CHARACTER AND THAT SUCH APPLICANT HAS NOT ENGAGED IN ANY ACTS, OR MADE ANY STATEMENTS THAT SUGGEST THEY ARE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN CONDUCT THAT WOULD RESULT IN HARM TO THEMSELVES OR OTHERS;​

Four character references to attest to the applicant’s “good moral character,” which standing alone, isn’t much of a big deal, except for the kicker that the aplicant “MADE ANY STATEMENTS THAT SUGGEST THEY ARE LIKELY TO ENGAGE IN CONDUCT THAT WOULD RESULT IN HARM TO THEMSELVES OR OTHERS.” What does that mean? That the applicant never said he felt depressed? That the applicant doesn’t like transgender or Antifa or AOC or, well, the list goes on.

But there’s more.

(III) CERTIFICATION OF COMPLETION OF THE TRAINING REQUIRED IN SUBDIVISION NINETEEN OF THIS SECTION; (IV) A LIST OF FORMER AND CURRENT SOCIAL MEDIA ACCOUNTS OF THE APPLICANT FROM THE PAST THREE YEARS TO CONFIRM THE INFORMATION REGARDING THE APPLICANTS CHARACTER AND CONDUCT AS REQUIRED IN SUBPARAGRAPH (II) OF THIS PARAGRAPH; AND (V) SUCH OTHER INFORMATION REQUIRED BY THE LICENSING OFFICER THAT IS REASONABLY NECESSARY AND RELATED TO THE REVIEW OF THE LICENSING APPLICATION.​

An applicant will be required to provide “former and current social media accounts” for the past three years to the licensing officer, so that the officer of the state can peruse one’s social media to decide whether ones utterances, or “likes,” or RTs (sorry Dave Weigel) meet with this official state approval of the sort of expression that makes the state, or perhaps just that particular licensing officer, feel that you’re of “good moral character”?

Will this pass constitutional muster? It would all seem a fairly flagrant violation of the First Amendment rights of applicants, whose rights are not generally subject to an official government litmus test of approved speech in order to exercise a fundamental right. But more to the point, the imposition of this requirement raises the stakes all around for legislative places no one should ever go when conditioning the exercise of constitutional rights.
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The author adds:

What if this were applied to voter registration, as there is nothing that precludes states from requiring good moral character of its residents to vote. What if this were applied to the right to counsel, to the right to be subject to compelled interrogation or to be a witness against yourself? The list is kinda long, even if mostly honored in the breach.
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I'd like to see that one implemented.

And a nice comparison to Texas abortion law:

Between the breakdown of norms and the “must win at any price” approach to every controversial issue, we’re watching imaginative approaches to problems that are poorly thought out, poorly executed and given little to no concern for how much they violate constitutional rights. If they comport with transitory popularity, nothing more matters, and New York at a state does not want people carrying guns.

And this is exclusive neither to New York nor guns, as made blatant by Texas’ efforts to stymie abortion in advance of Dobbs. Of course, if your metric for monumentally bad and stupid laws was Texas, then you’ve forsaken any claim to principle anyway. If the gimmick works in one place on one issue, what sort of intellectual deficiency makes you think it won’t be used elsewhere for another issue? And the downward spiral of society continues unabated.​

more at the link

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Why is that embarrassing?

Law firms make those decisions all the time. A number of firms for example don’t take work from pro life organizations.

 

New York Effectively Nullifies The Supreme Court’s Latest Pro-Second Amendment Decision

https://thefederalist.com/2022/07/05/new-york-effectively-nullifies-the-supreme-courts-latest-pro-second-amendment-decision/

excerpt:

The U.S. Supreme Court has made clear that the Second Amendment guarantees law-abiding citizens the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, both in their homes and in public. On Friday, New York responded that it didn’t care.

***
Massive Constitutional Suspension Zones
The larger constitutional problem with New York’s revised conceal-carry law concerns the state’s attempt to, in essence, declare most public spaces “sensitive locations” in which guns cannot be carried even by permitted individuals. Specifically, the statute makes it a felony to carry firearms “in or upon a sensitive location,” then provides an exhaustive list of sensitive locations which, because of its constitutional significance, is excerpted in full below:

(a) any place owned or under the control of federal, state or local government, for the purpose of government administration, including courts;

(b) any location providing health, behavioral health, or chemical dependance care or services;

(c) any place of worship or religious observation;

(d) libraries, public playgrounds, public parks, and zoos;

(e) the location of any program licensed, regulated, certified, funded, or approved by the office of children and family services that provides services to children, youth, or young adults, any legally exempt childcare provider; a childcare program for which a permit to operate such program has been issued by the department of health and mental hygiene pursuant to the health code of the city of New York;

(f) nursery schools, preschools, and summer camps;

(g) the location of any program licensed, regulated, certified, operated, or funded by the office for people with developmental disabilities;

(h) the location of any program licensed, regulated, certified, operated, or funded by office of addiction services and supports;

(i) the location of any program licensed, regulated, certified, operated, or funded by the office of mental health;

(j) the location of any program licensed, regulated, certified, operated, or funded by the office of temporary and disability assistance;

(k) homeless shelters, runaway homeless youth shelters, family shelters, shelters for adults, domestic violence shelters, and emergency shelters, and residential programs for victims of domestic violence;

(l) residential settings licensed, certified, regulated, funded, or operated by the department of health;

(m) in or upon any building or grounds, owned or leased, of any educational institutions, colleges and universities, licensed private career schools, school districts, public schools, private schools licensed under article one hundred one of the education law, charter schools, non-public schools, board of cooperative educational services, special act schools, preschool special education programs, private residential or non-residential schools for the education of students with disabilities, and any state-operated or state-supported schools;

(n) any place, conveyance, or vehicle used for public transportation or public transit, subway cars, train cars, buses, ferries, railroad, omnibus, marine or aviation transportation; or any facility used for or in connection with service in the transportation of passengers, airports, train stations, subway and rail stations, and bus terminals;

(o) any establishment issued a license for on-premise consumption pursuant to article four, four-A, five, or six of the alcoholic beverage control law where alcohol is consumed and any establishment licensed under article four of the cannabis law for on-premise consumption;

(p) any place used for the performance, art entertainment, gaming, or sporting events such as theaters, stadiums, racetracks, museums, amusement parks, performance venues, concerts, exhibits, conference centers, banquet halls, and gaming facilities and video lottery terminal facilities as licensed by the gaming commission;

(q) any location being used as a polling place;

(r) any public sidewalk or other public area restricted from general public access for a limited time or special event that has been issued a permit for such time or event by a governmental entity, or subject to specific, heightened law enforcement protection, or has otherwise had such access restricted by a governmental entity, provided such location is identified as such by clear and conspicuous signage;

(s) any gathering of individuals to collectively express their constitutional rights to protest or assemble;

(t) the area commonly known as Times Square, as such area is determined and identified by the city of New York; provided such area shall be clearly and conspicuously identified with signage.

Merely skimming these provisions confirms the breadth of the new law, which leaves New York residents with few public places where they may legally carry a gun for self-defense. That bottom line strikes to the core of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bruen that the Second Amendment guarantees a right for law-abiding, responsible citizens to carry a firearm in public for purposes of self-defense. New York’s expansive list of supposedly “sensitive locations” likewise ignores the Supreme Court’s analysis in Bruen.
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more at the link

 

States Rights... I mean, militias are cool to overthrow the Fed, but not states, amirite?

Can we get Alito to channel his inner Scalia to channel Madison on 17th century matters?

 

@Os Trigonum likes to CTRL - V all the time from legal blogs but seems pretty oblivious about how Big Law or courts really work (not that there's much merit in knowing this.)


For an old boomer with extra time - you'd expect more than a Breitbart JD.

 

The other thing is that i guess it's good people are finally seeing courts for what they are - tools to implement policy preferences by whoever can do so.

 

not right after the lawyer wins a Supreme Court case

 

I was thinking today of the millions school districts in Texas will now have to come up with to add security, weapons, fortification, teacher training, etc...to make them safer for the next mass shooting.

Where is all this money going to come from? Our state funding? Increased property taxes? How will all this money affect the already limited funding for teacher salaries, supplies, overcrowded classrooms, buildings needing huge upgrades to repair old a/c and heating units, and such?

This is the cost to allowing AR-15s and weapons designed to kill in mass into the hands of civilians. This is the cost of pack and carry and gun purchasing loopholes.

HISD will be spending over 2 million to do what they need to for future attacks. That is only one of over a thousand school districts in Texas. This is just crazy.

 

https://www.wsj.com/opinion/second-...-hardiman-630e4df3?mod=hp_opin_pos_3#cxrecs_s

The Second Amendment, Reawakened
An appeals court says a nonviolent misdemeanor doesn’t end gun rights.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 27, 2024 at 5:03 pm ET

The Second Amendment permits the government to disarm dangerous criminals, but what about people convicted of nonviolent paperwork offenses? Bryan Range pleaded guilty in 1995 to a state misdemeanor for lowballing his income on a form to get food stamps. He was put on probation and paid $2,458 in restitution. Decades later, federal law still bans him from owning a gun.

On Monday, however, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals ruled en banc, 13-2, that this doesn’t satisfy the Bill of Rights. “The record contains no evidence that Range poses a physical danger to others,” Judge Thomas Hardiman writes in Range v. Attorney General United States. “Because the Government has not shown that our Republic has a longstanding history and tradition of depriving people like Range of their firearms,” the law “cannot constitutionally strip him of his Second Amendment rights.”

This result makes sense amid the Supreme Court’s recent efforts to reawaken the Second Amendment, particularly in its landmark Bruen decision of 2022. Yet the details will take some judicial work to hash out. In the Third Circuit, as Judge Hardiman tells it, the government argued that the constitutional right to bear arms has historically been enjoyed by “law-abiding, responsible citizens,” a label that since 1995 doesn’t apply to Mr. Range.

But convicted criminals don’t categorically lose other constitutional rights, like free speech under the First Amendment, Judge Hardiman writes. As for the idea that gun ownership can be restricted to “law abiding” citizens, he says such a standard is too vague, since drivers with traffic tickets broke the law, and today’s statute books overflow with crimes of widely varying seriousness.

Judge Hardiman says the ruling is narrow, since Mr. Range challenged the gun ban only as applied to him. In dissent, Judge Patty Shwartz argues that the opinion’s logic is sweeping. In her view, the majority goes astray in searching for “a historical twin” to today’s disarming law, instead of looking to underlying principles. “At the founding,” she says, “a fraud-based crime of the type Range committed was considered a capital offense, which obviously carries with it the loss of all possessory rights.”

More of these cases are coming through the courts. Before President Biden pardoned him, Hunter Biden argued at one point that Bruen made it unconstitutional for the government to prosecute him for having a gun as a user of illegal drugs. What is the historical Founding-era analogy to crack addicts, and does the U.S. have a tradition of disarming them?

Perhaps the Supreme Court will have to take one or more of these cases to clarify. But the Justices clearly see that public safety requires disarming people who pose a threat. This year in Rahimi they held 8-1 that a civil restraining order was sufficient to take guns away from an alleged violent domestic abuser.

As the judiciary works to settle the questions that flow from Bruen, perhaps propensity for violence will be the divide. For the record, Judge Hardiman says Mr. Range’s criminal history, other than his 1995 conviction, “is limited to minor traffic and parking infractions and a summary offense for fishing without a license.”
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