This morning, the Supreme Court struck down a New York State law that limited concealed-firearm permits to those with a demonstrated need to carry arms outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the 6–3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, said, “The Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.” Bruen thus opens one of the next major battlegrounds over guns in America: not who can buy guns or what guns can be bought but where these firearms can be carried, every day, by the millions and millions of Americans who own them.
This question will have major implications for what it’s like to be an American. Are people carrying guns at schools and shopping malls and public parks? What about at churches and synagogues and mosques? What is it like to pray in places where fellow supplicants are armed? Courts and legislatures will have to decide whether people can carry guns at protests and political demonstrations, in voting booths, on the subway and bus, and in pretty much every other public space in American life. The Supreme Court spent several decades determining where in the public square—streets, sidewalks, airports, fairgrounds, public libraries, public plazas—speakers have a First Amendment right to communicate. The Court’s answer—not in every place, and not equally in all places—is probably a harbinger for how the justices will determine the “sensitive places” where firearms can be restricted.
After all, something must be done to stem the flow of weapons into all parts of the public square. Even with the staggering frequency of mass shootings in our country, the Supreme Court in Bruen has now limited states’ discretion in regulating guns. New research by the Violence Project on mass shootings from 1966 to 2019, funded by the National Institute of Justice, finds that more than three-fourths of mass shooters bought “at least some of their guns legally.” If states can no longer use discretion to limit the number of people and places with guns at the permitting stage, identifying “sensitive places” will become an important means of restricting the presence of firearms in the public square.
Most states already have robust public-carry rights. But tellingly, state laws in both red and blue states are also chock-full of bans on public carry in a host of locations. They include public transit, polling places, areas near permitted events, athletic facilities, public swimming pools, riverboat casinos, school-bus stops, pharmacies, business parking lots, public highways, amusement parks, zoos, liquor stores, airports, parades, demonstrations, financial institutions, theaters, hotel lobbies, tribal lands, and even gun shows. Discovering commonalities across such a variety of locations is difficult. But it is possible to identify the core safety, functional, and constitutional-value concerns that have long justified treating some places as “sensitive” for purposes of public carry.
Nearly 15 years ago, the Court indicated that public carry of firearms could be restricted or even banned in at least some places. In District of Columbia v. Heller, which recognized an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote that nothing in his majority opinion should “cast doubt” on “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.” These “longstanding” restrictions, the Court held, are “presumptively lawful.” Such wording raised more questions than it answered. What makes these places “sensitive”? And what about all the other public and private places where people engage in worship, commerce, and other activities—are any, or all, of these places “sensitive”? This question was very much on the justices’ mind during the oral argument in Bruen. They asked about public-carry rights in Times Square, on the New York City subway, at public demonstrations, and on university campuses.
For some gun-rights supporters, banning or restricting public carry anywhere violates the right to self-defense recognized in Heller. They argue that the need for protection can arise in any place. That position ignores the historical recognition ...
... That the question of “sensitive places” is now front and center is a sign of where the country is with its gun laws—fighting over the margins of its expansive gun freedoms, not whether those freedoms should be so expansive in the first place.
abcnews.go.com
www.nraila.org
As we may need to 'defend' ourselves and others from the 'babykiller' rioters!
