By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court turned away on Monday a challenge to New York firearms restrictions adopted shortly after the justices in 2022 struck down the Democratic state’s previous limits on carrying concealed handguns in a landmark ruling that expanded gun rights.
The justices declined to hear an appeal by six New York residents who either have or are seeking a concealed-carry license of a lower court’s decision that let the state enforce certain licensing requirements and restrictions in locations deemed “sensitive.”
The dispute centered on New York’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act, a Democratic-backed measure adopted after the court’s 2022 ruling that declared for the first time that the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense.
That ruling also announced a stringent test that required gun laws to be “consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation” to comply with the Second Amendment. It was one of three key rulings by the Supreme Court since 2008 that have broadened gun rights in a nation deeply divided over how to address firearms violence including frequent mass shootings. The United States has the world’s highest gun ownership rate.
New York’s new law, passed in July 2022, defined a longstanding requirement for firearm license applicants to have “good moral character” as the judgment to use a firearm “in a manner that does not endanger oneself or others.”
The law also made it a crime to carry a firearm in various “sensitive” locations, including government buildings, schools, healthcare facilities, theaters, bars, polling places and Manhattan’s Times Square.
The six plaintiffs sued in federal court challenging various aspects of the 2022 law.
U.S. Judge Glenn Suddaby in Syracuse, New York, blocked much of the law in 2022. The Manhattan-based 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals largely reversed Suddaby’s decision in 2024.
The plaintiffs had asked the Supreme Court to take up the case to resolve an ongoing debate over whether courts, when searching for historical analogues for gun restrictions, should look solely at when the Second Amendment was ratified in 1791, or also 1868, when the 14th Amendment extended the Constitution’s Bill of Rights – spanning its first 10 amendments – to the states.
The plaintiffs urged the court to look only at historical sources in 1791 and not later. The 2nd Circuit’s focus “on mid-to-late 19th-century sources was outcome-determinative in this case,” they said, because “no historical tradition” exists to justify the state’s law.
The Supreme Court, despite dramatically expanding gun rights, has shown a willingness to allow some limits.
The justices on March 26 upheld a regulation targeting largely untraceable “ghost guns.” In two rulings last year, they upheld a federal law that makes it a crime for people under domestic violence restraining orders to have guns but rejected a federal rule banning “bump stocks” – devices that enable semiautomatic weapons to fire rapidly like machine guns.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
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