Will the Supreme Court Use a New York City Regulation to Strike Down Gun Laws?New York City is a strange and dangerous place, if the plaintiffs in a gun-control case that the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear are to be believed. The suit, which calls the city’s restrictions on transporting handguns through its streets “bizarre,” “irrational,” and “perverse,” was brought by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association—along with two gun owners who live in the Bronx and one from Staten Island. The case is notable for reasons that go beyond its caricature of the city and its mores. To begin with, this will be the first time the Court seriously considers the Second Amendment since it adopted a radical view of gun rights in District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, which overturned a near-ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and in McDonald v. the City of Chicago, in 2010, which did away with similar restrictions in that city. Those decisions were “transformational,” the plaintiffs argue, but “the news has not yet reached New York City.”
It will also be the first opportunity for the Court’s newest member, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to begin building what promises to be a disastrous pro-gun legacy. Heller, a 5–4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, upended the way that generations of judges had read the Second Amendment, by recognizing a fundamental, individual right to bear arms, unconnected to a “well-regulated militia.” McDonald then confirmed that Heller could be used to overturn state and local gun laws, as well as federal legislation. Still, both decisions leave room for some basic, long-standing restrictions on guns, such as those that prevent violent felons from buying them. Kavanaugh, though, in the wake of Heller, appears ready to toss out as many restrictions as he can. As an appeals-court judge, he wrote, in a 2011 dissent, that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were “in common use.” He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019 ... n-gun-laws
