We are very relieved that the Supreme Court has made the decision to keep in place an existing appeals court ruling that upheld New York’s so-called “sensitive locations” concealed firearm ban, which prohibited carrying hidden guns in parks, hospitals, stadiums and other such locations, as well as a requirement for permit holders to show “good moral character.”
The Big Nine do so in just two words: “certiorari denied,” declining to hear the matter and leaving alone the appeals court decision, which did knock out some provisions of the same New York gun law, including a prohibition on concealed guns on private property that is otherwise open to the public.
This also means that such potential restrictions in other parts of the country could still be blocked by local federal courts, and that the Supreme Court could also step in and invalidate our restrictions here at a later time, just like they did three years ago when they first struck down New York’s century-old gun laws, which is of course what necessitated these new laws in the first place.
This high court game of will-they, won’t-they, where the outcome determines the sheer extent to which firearms will legally flood our public and private spaces with all the consequences that brings is not sustainable.
As much as the pro-gun contingent loves to trot out individual accounts of people using guns to ward off home invasions or shooting a “bad guy” — who, it’s rarely mentioned, often had to be shot because they also had a gun that they’d easily acquired and were using nefariously — the fact is that it’s much more common for someone to use to a gun on themselves or to escalate what would have otherwise been a fistfight or shouting match.
Instead of all this, the court should go back to the drawing board and toss out its ridiculous 2008 ruling in the Heller case, which first introduced the concept that the Constitution’s Second Amendment establishes a practically unabridged individual right to buy and own guns.
As much as the gun nuts and their political and legal supporters pretend that this is some sacred tradition dating back to the founding, this view essentially dates back to the 1980s and has been recognized as the law of the land for less than two decades, with that Heller ruling reformulating the plain meaning of the amendment to effectively remove its first clause about “a well regulated Militia.”
This current interpretation of the Constitution would have been laughed out of court just a few decades ago, and guns haven’t gotten any less deadly since then. At the level of private gun ownership in the United States — with significantly more guns in private hands than there are people in the country — it’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle when it comes to proliferation, but at least we can take reasonable steps to stop the sales to people that really shouldn’t have guns and control the ability to carry them out and about freely.
The fact that most other countries on Earth, and certainly peer countries economically, have tiny fractions of our total numbers of gun deaths and injuries shows that basic, common-sense restrictions work and work well. Our carnage is a choice.
