Is This A Gun Case SCOTUS Will Actually Hear, For All Our Sake?

Despite the Supreme Court’s rulings in both Heller and McDonald, the anti-gunners are still at it. They want to completely bypass those rulings and continue to push to disarm the American public. Some have even suggested repealing the Second Amendment to clear the way for more gun control.

Advertisement

However, Dan Zimmerman at The Truth About Guns has a case that he thinks may be just the Supreme Court case we’ve all been waiting for.

But as we pointed out, there were a lot of problems with that particular case and SCOTUS is very picky in terms of what it takes for review, particularly when it deals with a hot-button subject like Second Amendment rights. TTAG reader and attorney LKB, who watches the progress of gun rights cases very closely, opined that the Court was waiting for just the right case, one that the pro-2A side judges to be ideal for re-affirming the individual right to keep and bear arms and striking another blow for the RKBA.

In his opinion, New York Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York is just such a case. Last week, the plaintiffs filed a brief in support of their petition for writ of certiorari. The complaint involves  the City of New York’s law that prevents gun owners from transporting licensed, locked and unloaded firearms outside the city under any circumstances. They can only use their guns within the five boroughs.

Some highlights:

…(T)he City defends its extreme and novel ban on the theory that the ban makes it easier to enforce other laws that already specifically prohibit practices with which the City is really concerned. That kind of prophylaxis-on-prophylaxis is the antithesis of the meaningful tailoring required by heightened scrutiny. And it highlights that the ban is a prototypical example of a law that could survive when the collective rights view of the Second Amendment held sway but is a complete anachronism in light of Hellerand McDonald. The City’s ban cannot be reconciled with a Second Amendment that protects individual rights or with any meaningful level of constitutional scrutiny. The fact that the Second Circuit upheld it while purporting to apply heightened scrutiny is thus reason enough for this Court’s review. …

New York City’s ban on transporting licensed, locked up, and unloaded handguns to any place outside the City—including a second home where petitioners would exercise their core right to possess them for self-defense, or a shooting range at which petitioners would hone their ability to exercise that right—is an extreme and irrational outlier that does not even make sense on its own terms.

Setting aside that there is absolutely no evidence that transporting an unloaded firearm, locked in a container separate from its ammunition, presents a material public safety risk, the City’s ban is not even rationally designed to reduce the incidence of such transport, as it actually forces New Yorkers to spend more time transporting their firearms through the streets of New York, rather than to more conveniently located shooting ranges just across city or state lines. And the prohibition on transporting a firearm to a second home has the bizarre result of keeping more handguns in the City, including in vacant within-city-limits residences.

That’s right. NYC’s gun owners can only use shooting ranges located within city limits. If they own a home on Long Island or in Westchester County, they can’t take their guns with them to use on a weekend trip.

Advertisement

There’s a lot more to read over there, and I urge you to go and do so. It’s an interesting case because the New York City law is bizarre. I mean, even anti-gunners should be able to look at this and see how it makes no sense.

Remember, gun control advocates think more guns will result in more crime. Yet NYC’s law actually makes it legally impossible to take a firearm outside of the city, meaning the baseline number of guns will never decrease. Additionally, firearms continue to be sold within the city, meaning the number of them inside city limits only increases.

For gun control zealots, that should be completely unacceptable.

Look, this looks like a slam-dunk case, and it needs to be heard. Is this the case that gun rights advocates have been waiting for, though? I don’t think so.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see how a ruling on this will impact other issues, like New Jersey’s refusal to honor federal law regarding the transportation of firearms through jurisdictions, but I just don’t see how it’ll be the grand slam we’ve all been waiting for.

Then again, I’m not an attorney, so we’ll see. I sincerely hope I’m wrong on this one.

Join the conversation as a VIP Member