Gun Lobby Lacks Broad Support in New York Case

             The New York gun rights advocates who are asking the Supreme Court to establish a presumptive constitutional right to carry firearms in public outside the home lack broad support for their claim among the dozens of friend-of-the-court briefs filed by groups on both sides of the issue.

            The Republican-packed Court will hear oral arguments in the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, on Wednesday, Nov. 3. The Biden administration will share time with the state’s lawyer to defend the state law that requires applicants for a gun permit to show “proper cause” for needing to be armed in public.

            Most of the forty-seven amicus briefs supporting the New York gun group in the case were filed by elements of the gun lobby itself: gun owner groups in other states, libertarian advocacy groups aligned with the gun lobby, or law professors with careers built on Second Amendment scholarship.

            The groups that filed thirty-seven amicus briefs on New York’s side represent much broader segments of American society, including the professional associations representing the nation’s doctors and the nation’s lawyers. In its brief, the American Medical Association (AMA) argues that “unrestricted concealed carry permits” would “open the floodgates to more injury and death” from what the doctors call “the epidemic of firearm violence.”

            Other groups supporting New York’s position include such long established civil liberties and civil rights organizations as the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund (LDF), and the League of Women Voters. Like the AMA, these groups warn that making it easier for people to go armed on the streets would add to the risks of gun violence – including intimidation and harassment against, among others, free-speech demonstrators,  minority groups, and would-be voters waiting in line at polling places.

In its brief, the ACLU argues that broad bans on public carry, enacted and enforced when the Second Amendment was ratified, were historically important in “promoting safety and reducing the chances that the disagreements inevitable in a robust democracy do not lead to lethal violence.”

The ACLU also notes that the two states that recently experienced armed insurrections at their state capitals, Michigan and Oregon, both have lax open carry laws. The brief also argues that the District of Columbia’s relatively strict public carry law helped limit potential violence during the January 6 insurrection by encouraging insurrectionists to leave weapons at home or in their cars.

The ACLU’s brief continues by listing half a dozen instances when gun-carrying individuals with permits threatened or fired their weapons at innocent bystanders—among others, “Black Lives Matter” protesters. The other victims included, for example, a Walmart customer who asked a gun-toting fellow customer to put on a mask and a black family threatened by a gun-carrying white driver in a parking-lot dispute.

            In its brief, the League of Women Voters notes that threats and force “have long been used to intimidate voters.” The League warns further that “handgun proliferation reasonably creates fear that voting-related conflict and unrest will turn violent.”

            Red states and blue states lined up, as often happens, in amicus briefs filed according to their political orientations on opposite sides of the case. Most of the twenty-six states that support the New York gun group already have enacted so-called “shall issue” laws in response to lobbying from the National Rifle Association (NRA); the red states argue that “objective permit regimes” reduce some types of violent crimes and have no statistically significant effect on violent crime overall. In an opposing brief, seven former big-city police chiefs, including New York City’s former police commissioner William Bratton, contend to the contrary that New York’s licensing regime “makes the state’s citizens safer without infringing on protected constitutional rights.”
            Eighteen blue states and the District of Columbia joined in an amicus brief filed by California in support of the New York law. Besides California, the list includes three other states – Illinois, Michigan, and Pennsylvania -- among the ten most populous in the country. The red states’ brief includes two of the mega-states, Texas and Florida, along with four of the states among the country’s least populous: Alaska, the Dakotas, and Wyoming.

            The government’s brief notes that Congress has enacted an array of federal laws limiting, for example, the carrying of firearms aboard airplanes, in school zones, and in government buildings. Those laws, the government argues, comport with the Second Amendment and so also do local and state laws regulating open or concealed carry. In effect, the government warns, a ruling against the New York law would risk upending public-safety laws enacted at all levels of government in the interest of a radical revision of constitutional law urged by a narrow slice of the American public and the legal profession.