Care to elaborate?

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
Care to elaborate?

my thoughts too. I hate posts that are just an unknown link to someplace else. I don't click on links unless I can verify what the site is.

Relevant text please?

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:

Care to elaborate?

Agreed. A brief (pun?) summary would be good, instead of just a link with no other information.

I think what the OP is saying is The Supreme Court has decided to hear the case.

Issue: Whether New York City’s ban on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits is consistent with the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause and the constitutional right to travel.

From the SCOTUS Blog:

quote:

Whether New York City’s ban on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun to a home or shooting range outside city limits is consistent with the Second Amendment, the Commerce Clause and the constitutional right to travel.

The facts pertaining to this lawsuit are as follows:
N.Y. State requires a firearms license to even touch a handgun (conscious thoughts about firearms have yet to be successfully regulated).

The state's permits, as outlined in N.Y. Pen. Law § 400.00, are defined by statute as being either a "carry" permit or a "Premise" permit which is valid ONLY at the address listed on the permit's face. The law allows narrow exceptions to premise permit holders for unloaded transport to and from a gun dealer, gunsmith, and local police station.

Now, the NYPD used to issue permits which it labeled "Hunting and Target Permit." All was well until a few individuals were caught carrying with the target permit. When the case was presented to a judge, the judge asked the NYPD if their target permit is issued as a premises only permit. The NYPD then testified that it is not such. The judge, in turn, then ruled that this target permit is a CCW according to state law, and that all restrictions are only "administrative" in nature with no weight of the law.

The NYPD, as a result, started issuing premises only permits for all but those privileged few who can obtain a NYC carry permit. State law has an embedded provision which states that permits issued outside of NYC are valid unless validated by the city police commissioner. All this makes the authority of the NYPD absolute as to who gets to carry in the city.

According to NYS law, transporting a handgun to and/or from the range with a premises permit is a felony. Yet the NYPD is the one enforcing the law in NYC, and they do as they please. However, they prohibit transport outside of the city limits.
They do issue what they call a "hunting authorization card" allowing for out of city hunting transport, but no such exception is allowed for shooting at any range other that the paltry few city ranges. Participation in out of state competitions, transport to a owned second home, and out of state CCW is effectively barred by the NYPD for city residents.
They even got a federal circuit judge to rule that FOPA transport protections to not apply to a Premise Permit (Beach V. Kelly).

While NYC politics, Ocasio-Cortez notwithstanding, do not represent the politics of the country of a whole, this case is the first gun rights case that the Supreme Court has decided to listen to in 9 years.
The analytical framework utilized to arrive at an eventual decision will inevitably expand on the court's earlier DC V. Heller landmark decision.
This is markedly so given that NYC's rationale for its policy is a layered one, which the petitioners call a "prophylaxis on prophylaxis."

This message has been edited. Last edited by: werzjon229,

quote:

Originally posted by radioman:

quote:

Originally posted by smschulz:
Care to elaborate?

my thoughts too. I hate posts that are just an unknown link to someplace else. I don't click on links unless I can verify what the site is.

The link is to scotusblog.com, which has been around forever. Click with confidence.

Wow! That is ridiculous. Sounds like a place where criminals would thrive.

Excerpts from the filings:


T)he City defends its extreme and novel ban on the theory that the ban makes it easier to enforce other laws that already specifically prohibit practices with which the City is really concerned. That kind of prophylaxis-on-prophylaxis is the antithesis of the meaningful tailoring required by heightened scrutiny. And it highlights that the ban is a prototypical example of a law that could survive when the collective rights view of the Second Amendment held sway but is a complete anachronism in light of Heller and McDonald. The City’s ban cannot be reconciled with a Second Amendment that protects individual rights or with any meaningful level of constitutional scrutiny. The fact that the Second Circuit upheld it while purporting to apply heightened scrutiny is thus reason enough for this Court’s review. …

New York City’s ban on transporting licensed, locked up, and unloaded handguns to any place outside the City—including a second home where petitioners would exercise their core right to possess them for self-defense, or a shooting range at which petitioners would hone their ability to exercise that right—is an extreme and irrational outlier that does not even make sense on its own terms.

Setting aside that there is absolutely no evidence that transporting an unloaded firearm, locked in a container separate from its ammunition, presents a material public safety risk, the City’s ban is not even rationally designed to reduce the incidence of such transport, as it actually forces New Yorkers to spend more time transporting their firearms through the streets of New York, rather than to more conveniently located shooting ranges just across city or state lines. And the prohibition on transporting a firearm to a second home has the bizarre result of keeping more handguns in the City, including in vacant within-city-limits residences.


As to the prohibition on transporting an unloaded and locked-up firearm to a second home, the City literally does not offer any public safety rationale at all. Instead, it merely attempts to minimize the public safety risks caused by the ban’s requirement that New Yorkers leave their handguns in vacant homes. The City hypothesizes that those affected by the ban are sufficiently law-abiding that the handguns will be completely inaccessible to decidedly less law-abiding burglars. BIO.22.

But even assuming the City is not underestimating its burglars, its confidence in the law-abiding nature of its licensees fatally undermines its administrability defense. If the City can trust handgun owners to exercise such care with their handguns at home, then surely it can trust them to responsibly transport them to shooting ranges and second homes.


The City attempts to minimize the burden its ban imposes by asserting that petitioners could hone their skills by renting a firearm outside the City. BIO.20. As an initial matter, there is no record evidence whatsoever to substantiate this hypothesis. But more to the point, petitioners seek to confirm the operability of, and their ability to safely and effectively use, their handguns, not someone else’s. If any of them is ever forced to defend his or her home, the fact that a different handgun maintained by someone else across the Hudson would be up to the task will be of precious little comfort.

The City tries to paint its ban as in accord with federal law affirmatively protecting individuals’ rights to transport firearms in interstate commerce if they are unloaded, locked up, and not readily accessible. 18 U.S.C. §926A. According to the City, that law reflects Congress’ judgment that “only individuals with a carry license, not those who hold a premises license,” BIO.21, may be trusted to transport their firearms. But that argument is doubly problematic. Few jurisdictions have an analog to the City’s “premises” license, and most not only allow unlicensed possession in the home but also permit carrying without a license (or issue a license on a shall-issue basis).

Thus, the thrust of the federal law is to “confer[] upon all law- abiding citizens a right to transport their firearms in a safe manner in interstate commerce.” City of Camden v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp., 81 F. Supp. 2d 541, 549 (D.N.J. 2000) (emphasis added). And even the City acknowledges that those with a “premises” license can permissibly transport their handguns if they are unloaded, locked, and inaccessible while the owner is en route to an in-city range. Nothing in federal law remotely supports the City’s irrational effort to prevent licensees from employing the same safe and federally sanctioned storage conditions en route to nearby ranges or vacation homes.

While this Court’s tendency to clarify constitutional boundaries by reviewing and invalidating outlier statutes that transgress those boundaries is hardly limited to the Second Amendment, there is no context in which this kind of development is more essential. This Court’s effort to develop a coherent Second Amendment to guide lower courts was frustrated by the decades in which the collective-rights view of the amendment held sway.

This Court’s decisions in Heller and McDonald thus reflect the sum total of this Court’s guidance. Yet, as the petition documented, many lower courts have drained Heller and McDonald, and even the very notion of heightened scrutiny, of much of their meaning by upholding laws that regulate and tax firearms as if they were entitled to no constitutional protection. See Pet.22-24. The City dismisses these laws as unrelated to its ban, but courts have upheld such laws by applying the same basic watered-down version of heightened scrutiny that the Second Circuit applied here. Heller and McDonald began the process of developing a meaningful Second Amendment jurisprudence by invalidating outlier statutes, but they cannot be this Court’s last word.

https://www.scotusblog.com/cas...f-new-york-new-york/

NY Time article.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...uns-nyc-license.html

Supreme Court Will Hear Second Amendment Case

By Adam Liptak
Jan. 22, 2019

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court agreed on Tuesday to hear a challenge to a New York City gun ordinance that does not allow people licensed to have guns in their homes to transport the weapons outside the city.

The court has not heard a Second Amendment case since 2010. The new case will illuminate the court’s approach to gun rights after the arrival of Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh in October installed a reliable five-member conservative majority.

The city’s ordinance allows residents with so-called premises licenses to take their guns to one of seven shooting ranges within the city limits. But the ordinance forbids them to transport their guns anywhere else, including second homes and shooting ranges outside the city, even when they are unloaded and locked in a container separate from ammunition.

Three city residents and the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association sued to challenge the law but lost in a Federal District Court in Manhattan and in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. A unanimous three-judge panel of the Second Circuit ruled that the ordinance passed constitutional muster under District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court decision that established an individual right to keep guns in the home for self-defense.

In urging the Supreme Court to hear their appeal in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. City of New York, No. 18-280, the challengers said the restrictions imposed by the New York City ordinance were unique in the nation and made no sense.

“Only New York City flatly prohibits its residents from removing their lawfully purchased and duly registered handguns from the city limits, even to transport them (unloaded, and locked up) to second homes at which they are constitutionally entitled to possess them, or to out-of-city shooting ranges or competitions at which they are constitutionally entitled to hone their safe and effective use,” the challengers’ brief said.

“That prohibition does not even make sense on its own terms,” the brief said. “It has the perverse consequences of forcing New Yorkers to leave their handguns behind in their vacant residences whenever they leave the city for an extended period of time.”

Lawyers for the city responded that the law was justified by public safety considerations. Before 2001, their brief said, the city offered a license that allowed owners to take their guns to shooting ranges outside the city.

The Police Department, the brief said, “observed widespread abuses.” Firing ranges within the city must keep detailed records, the brief said, but people with the old licenses who were found with guns outside their homes could claim to be headed to a range outside the city that did not keep such records.

Since its decision in the Heller case, the court has said little about the scope of the Second Amendment. In the lower courts, few challenges to gun control laws since the Heller decision have succeeded.

Last year, dissenting from the court’s decision not to hear a Second Amendment case, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that the court was abdicating its duty to protect an important constitutional right.

“As evidenced by our continued inaction in this area,” he wrote, “the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this court.”

“The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this court’s constitutional orphan,” Justice Thomas wrote. “And the lower courts seem to have gotten the message.”

So if SCOTUS finds this NY law to be unconstitutional, short of the benefits to New Yorkers, would this case have any broader implications for the rest of us?

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
So if SCOTUS finds this NY law to be unconstitutional, short of the benefits to New Yorkers, would this case have any broader implications for the rest of us?

Not really. Why? Cities/Counties/States that enact Unconstitutional 2A legislation suffer no consequences. Until a Mayor/County Commissioner/Governor has to PERSONALLY go to jail or pay a fine for their jackass actions, then it will continue.

Hopefully, it will shed light on how future 2A cases will be looked upon.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
So if SCOTUS finds this NY law to be unconstitutional, short of the benefits to New Yorkers, would this case have any broader implications for the rest of us?

Obligatory IANAL, but it could go either way. Sometimes the Supreme Court makes very, very narrow rulings. They also sometimes make rulings that are less narrow, or occasionally very broad.

Assuming they ruled this law unconstitutional, the Supreme Court could rule this law unconstitutional using arguments so specific that the ruling really only applies to this law. They could also rule this law unconstitutional because the Second Amendment guarantees an unconditional right to carry a loaded firearm anywhere you want (although there's not a snowball's chance in hell of that actually happening). Or they could rule anywhere in between.

I think the Supreme Court has tended towards pretty narrow rulings recently.

quote:

Originally posted by bigdeal:
So if SCOTUS finds this NY law to be unconstitutional, short of the benefits to New Yorkers, would this case have any broader implications for the rest of us?

It could, or it may not. It depends on how they rule, and the basis of the ruling. That is something that is almost impossible to predict at this stage. They could make some very narrow ruling, which might only affect rules about transporting guns. Or the ruling may be broader. Generally, courts prefer to make narrower rulings so as to no set off unexpected consequences when broad rules have to be applied to fact patterns that don't match with the facts in the case in which the rule originated.

This seems like a strange case to pick. However I'm hoping this means with the arrival of Brett Kavanaugh that the SCOTUS will be more willing to look at gun rights cases, and actually enforce the Second Amendment.

quote:

Originally posted by Edmond:
Wow! That is ridiculous. Sounds like a place where criminals would thrive.

They do thrive there. They are employed by the local and state government.

quote:

Originally posted by BBMW:
This seems like a strange case to pick. However I'm hoping this means with the arrival of Brett Kavanaugh that the SCOTUS will be more willing to look at gun rights cases, and actually enforce the Second Amendment.

This one sounds like low-hanging fruit.

NYC's restrictions are so extreme that it seems like there's no way they could pass the no-less-onerous means test.

Then SCOTUS can check of the 2nd Amendment box and get on to other issues.