According to nbc news
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Constitution provides a right to carry a gun outside the home, issuing a major decision on the meaning of the Second Amendment.
The 6-3 ruling was the court’s second important decision on the right to “keep and bear arms.” In a landmark 2008 decision, the court said for the first time that the amendment safeguards a person’s right to possess firearms, although the decision was limited to keeping guns at home for self-defense.
The court has now taken that ruling to the next step after years of ducking the issue and applied the Second Amendment beyond the limits of homeowners’ property.
The case involved a New York law that required showing a special need to get a permit to carry a concealed handgun in public. The state bans carrying handguns openly, but it allows residents to apply for licenses to carry them concealed.
The law at issue said, however, that permits could be granted only to applicants who demonstrated some special need — a requirement that went beyond a general desire for self-protection.
Gun owners in the state sued, contending that the requirement made it virtually impossible for ordinary citizens to get the necessary license. They argued that the law turned the Second Amendment into a limited privilege, not a constitutional right.
The court agreed with the challengers and struck down the heightened requirement, but it left the door open to allowing states to impose limits on the carrying of guns.
“The constitutional right to bear arms in public for self defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees,’” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in the majority opinion. “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”
In a concurring opinion, Justice Brett Kavanaugh said the ruling does not bar states from imposing licensing requirements for carrying handguns for self-defense, such as fingerprinting, background checks and mental health records checks.
New York’s law was “problematic because it grants open-ended discretion to licensing officials and authorizes licenses only for those applicants who can show some special need apart from self-defense” — in effect, denying citizens the right to carry a gun to protect themselves, he wrote.
In a dissent joined by liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, Justice Stephen Breyer mentioned recent mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, Buffalo, N.Y., and elsewhere, saying it is “often necessary” for the court to consider gun violence in deciding Second Amendment issues.
“The dangers posed by firearms can take many forms,” Breyer wrote. “Newspapers report mass shootings occurring at an entertainment district in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (3 dead and 11 injured); an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas (21 dead); a supermarket in Buffalo, New York (10 dead and 3 injured); a series of spas in Atlanta, Georgia (8 dead); a busy street in an entertainment district of Dayton, Ohio (9 dead and 17 injured); a nightclub in Orlando, Florida (50 dead and 53 injured); a church in Charleston, South Carolina (9 dead); a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado (12 dead and 50 injured); an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut (26 dead); and many, many more.”
“And mass shootings are just one part of the problem,” he added. “Easy access to firearms can also make many other aspects of American life more dangerous. Consider, for example, the effect of guns on road rage.”
“New York’s Legislature considered the empirical evidence about gun violence and adopted a reasonable licensing law to regulate the concealed carriage of handguns in order to keep the people of New York safe,” he concluded.
The ruling could affect the ability of state and local governments to impose a wide variety of firearms regulations. All states allow carrying concealed guns in public, although many require state-issued permits.
The decision casts doubt on laws similar to New York’s in several other states, including California, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey, which provide local officials with more discretion to deny requests for permits.
New York’s Democratic governor, Kathy Hochul, responded to the ruling Thursday, first tweeting, “It is outrageous that at a moment of national reckoning on gun violence, the Supreme Court has recklessly struck down a New York law that limits those who can carry concealed weapons.”
“In response to this ruling, we are closely reviewing our options — including calling a special session of the legislature. Just as we swiftly passed nation-leading gun reform legislation, I will continue to do everything in my power to keep New Yorkers safe from gun violence,” Hochul said.
At an event celebrating a new law to enhance school safety in the state, Hochul also called on Congress to strengthen federal gun laws by closing loopholes by raising the age to buy a semiautomatic weapon from 18 to 21.