Justice Sotomayor Orders New York to Answer Emergency Request to Block Gun-Carry Law

New York will have to show the Supreme Court why it should be able to continue enforcing the latest gun law after the Court struck down the previous law.

Justice Sonya Sotomayor asked the state to respond to an urgent request from plaintiffs in one of the Second Circuit’s cases against its law. Sotomayor oversees the Second Circuit, which recently issued a temporary stay on it Antonyuk v. Nigrelli which allows the state to continue to enforce its own law while it is in litigation. A lower court judge had ruled that most of the new state law violates the Second Amendment under the test established by the Court earlier this year in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (NYSRPA) v. Bruen. The plaintiffs are asking the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) to lift the stay and block the law if the court case develops.

“Governor Hochul and state legislators wasted no time in passing legislation that completely contradicted the Bruen precedent, and we urge the Supreme Court to once again hold the state accountable for violating the Second Amendment rights of its citizens, ” Erich Pratt, senior vice president. of plaintiff Gun Owners of America, said in a statement.

Sotomayor can either rule on the motions herself or refer them to the full Court. The outcome will immediately determine whether New York’s recent restrictions remain in place. More importantly, if the full Court rules, it will provide the first insight into how it will handle gun cases after Bruen. Whether the Court gets involved in the matter at this point and what they decide could signal how aggressive he plans to be when confronting lawmakers who hope to challenge or override Bruen. It could also help further chip away at Second Amendment protections, which have received relatively little attention from the Supreme Court compared to some other amendments.

Judge Glenn Suddaby of the Northern District of New York ruled Antonyuk that much of New York’s response to SCOTUS striking down its previous strict and subjective gun permit regime was just as much reconstruction. It held that the Concealed Transportation Improvement Act’s (CCIA) subjective “good moral character” standard for issuing permits was similarly unsupported by American tradition and violated the text of the Second Amendment.

“[A]Although the Court in no way suggests that America lacks a historical tradition of firearms licensing schemes, it finds (based on the parties’ current briefing) that America lacks a historical tradition of firearms licensing schemes that have grant open licensing to licensing officers. ,” Judge Suddaby wrote.

It also found parts of the law requiring disclosure of social media activity and information about family members to be unconstitutional. The same was true of the state’s attempt to massively expand which places are off-limits to carrying a gun, even by those with a permit. It lifted the ban on holding in restaurants serving alcohol, theaters, protests, places of worship, banquet halls or conference centers, parks, areas at airports or clinics in front of security checkpoints and public buses. Suddaby also blocked the state’s attempt to make it illegal to enter private businesses that are open to the public without express permission, a policy that is the exact opposite of every other state.

It also chided the state for failing to provide evidence of historical analogs for many of its modern restrictions, as required by Bruen in power. He said his research on the subject found little evidence that there were any historical restrictions dating back to the passage of the Second Amendment that are substantially similar to most of the new regulations in New York law. For example, he noted that he could find no historical law similar to social media account review.

“Rather, the Court has found at most only cases in which this requirement has been (properly) made to convicted sex offenders while on a sex offender registry,” he wrote. “Suffice it to say, the need to regulate convicted sex offenders has not been shown to be analogous to the need to regulate applicants for a concealed carry license.”

Suddaby also found much of the evidence New York presented lacking.

“For the sake of brevity, the Court will not explain why it finds that prohibiting some people from openly carrying rifles on other people’s farms and lands in 19th-century America is not tantamount to prohibiting all bearers. of the license to carry concealed weapons in almost every advertisement. building now”, he wrote. “Even if the way the historical and modern regulations burdened one’s Second Amendment right were the same, the state defendants’ attempt to analogize these six laws to Section 5 of the CCIA would be thwarted in the second of the Supreme Court’s two ‘central’ metrics: “Why regulations burden a law-abiding citizen’s right to armed self-defense.”

He said some of the state’s new restrictions are simply a “thinly disguised version of the kind of impermissible “sensitive location” regulation that the Supreme Court considered and struck down in NYSRPA. He even argued that the retention ban in protest was doubly unconstitutional.

“[T]The Court finds itself in a paradox created by a regulation that prevents a license holder from possessing a handgun while gathering with individuals to collectively express their right to protest the regulation by possessing a handgun,” he wrote. “Besides frivolity, the Court does not see how prohibiting Plaintiff Terrille from carrying concealed weapons at a gun show at a Polish community center would advance this regulation’s purpose of avoiding ‘destruction.'[uction] [of] the exercise of [someone else’s] constitutionally protected rights.’ The court may be wrong, but it will hazard a guess that the Center probably does not give space to opposing expressive groups at the same time.”

Suddaby ultimately ruled that most of the CCIA’s regulations are “unreasonably disproportionate to the burden of [their] historical analogues”, and the law is presented with “unprecedented constitutional violations”.

Still, the Second Circuit sided with the state when New York appealed the decision and asked to stay Suddaby’s decision. It issued a suspension that will remain in place at least until the appeal proceedings begin. The Second Circuit has issued stays of all three lower court decisions that have found various aspects of the New York law unconstitutional.

New York has until Tuesday, January 3 at 4:00 PM Eastern to file its response to the gun rights plaintiffs’ urgent request.