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People take part in a rally in New York on June 11, 2022, in support of gun control, following a string of deadly mass shootings, including one in Uvalde, Texas.
On Thursday, the reactionary Supreme Court majority struck down New York City’s concealed-carry law, first passed in 1913, which requires applicants to show “proper cause” if they want to carry a gun in public. About a quarter of the American population lives in states with similar rules.
Both on the legal merits and in terms of plain common sense, the Court’s ruling here is deranged. The reasoning, if it may be so dignified, is heavily based on the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which struck down that city’s ban on handguns and established an individual right to own guns for the first time.
As former Justice John Paul Stevens once wrote, Heller is “unquestionably the most clearly incorrect decision that the Supreme Court announced during my tenure on the bench.” Until dogmatic gun nut ideology conquered the Republican Party, it was widely agreed that the Second Amendment was principally concerned with state-controlled militias (which de facto haven’t existed since 1903), and therefore both federal and state governments had wide latitude to regulate personal gun possession and use. Now, not only does the Court confirm Heller, but expands it to grant a constitutional right to carry guns in public, which cannot be abridged with even a century-old condition that the individual must prove, in order to get a concealed-carry permit, that the gun is needed for self-defense.
But set aside legal arcana and just look around. In my hometown of Philadelphia, for instance, issuance of concealed-carry permits increased by about sixfold in 2021, mostly thanks to the city police department dramatically streamlining the application process. Recently at a popular nightlife district, a minor street fight between two men with such permits quickly escalated to a gun battle, which sparked off a chaotic melee of panicked shooting from three additional people that killed two innocent bystanders and badly wounded several more.
The Court’s decision here unquestionably increases the chances of that kind of thing happening in New York City and every other place whose gun control schemes have just been gutted by judicial rule-by-decree. Careful research also demonstrates that places that pass right-to-carry laws are associated with a 13 to 15 percent increase in violent crime.
The Constitution had many flaws when it was written and many flaws today. But it cannot possibly have been intended to prohibit the government from regulating the manufacture and sale of weapons that would have appeared magical to 18th-century statesmen. Neither is the Constitution a handbook for insurrectionists to overthrow the government based upon it. Controlling the instruments of violence and protecting the citizenry from each other are the foundational responsibilities of any legitimate state, no matter what Clarence Thomas or any other Supreme Court justice says.
