[This is a guest post based on a paper that was presented at the 2023 Firearms Law Works-In-Progress Workshop. The Workshop is held each year on a home-and-away basis with the University of Wyoming Firearms Research Center. This post does not necessarily represent the views of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.] Since its enactment in […]
This is Part Two in a two-part series on the history of North Carolina’s 1879 concealed carry law. Part One summarized the historical context and legislative record surrounding the law. Part Two will address how the law was enforced in one North Carolina county in the decades after it was enacted. Enforcement of the 1879 […]
Contemporary debates over gun policy often occur in the shadow of history. As we previously described, the recent debate in the North Carolina legislature over whether to repeal the state’s 1919 law requiring a state-issued permit to purchase a handgun was framed by competing claims about why that law was originally enacted. Those who supported […]
On March 31, U.S. District Court Judge Katherine Menendez issued a decision in Worth v. Harrington finding portions of a Minnesota statute unconstitutional and enjoining the state from enforcing the statute in the future. The provision struck down in Worth is a part of the state’s permit-to-carry statute. In Minnesota, a permit is required to […]
In just over ten months since Bruen was decided last June, there has been significant movement on gun regulation at the state level. On the surface, these developments aren’t all that surprising because they generally track what one would expect given the partisan balance in each state legislature: red states have tended to roll back […]
This post is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” which includes Jake Charles’ post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment, and Robert Leider’s post Pretextually Eliminating the Right to Bear Arms through Gerrymandered Property Rules. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the […]
This is a guest post that is part of a mini-symposium on “Private Property and the Second Amendment,” responding to Jake Charles’ earlier post Bruen, Private Property & the Second Amendment. Stay tuned for additional response posts that will run on the blog in the coming weeks. When the Supreme Court required public school desegregation […]
In the decade and a half since Heller, there has been a considerable amount of scholarship and litigation about the spaces where the Second Amendment extends. Bruen settled some of those questions by granting a right to publicly carry with no showing of need. And it suggested there could be permissible restrictions in certain sensitive […]
Last Monday, many of us awoke to the terrible news about a shooting at the University of Virginia on Sunday night that left three students dead and two others injured. Another public college not far away, Virginia Tech, was the site of a horrific mass shooting in 2007 that killed 32 people and injured 17 […]
After New York moved quickly post-Bruen to amend its gun laws to institute new application requirements and designate additional locations as sensitive places where guns are banned, the expectation was that other former may-issue states would follow suit. That largely has not transpired yet, and New York’s law—including many of its locational restrictions—was temporarily restrained […]
In recent weeks, the Center has devoted a great deal of space to covering the legal implications of the Bruen decision, including how lower courts in New York, Virginia, Texas, and other jurisdictions have started to apply its history-focused framework. But what about Bruen’s practical implications? Has the decision impacted the number of people seeking […]
On October 6, Judge Glenn T. Suddaby of the Northern District of New York issued a decision partially granting a request for a temporary restraining order of New York’s revised gun law (the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, or CCIA). The CCIA was passed on July 1, about a week after Bruen, and took effect on […]
We previously summarized the preliminary injunction briefing in Antonyuk v. Bruen, a challenge to New York’s amended gun laws. Following a hearing on August 23, Chief Judge Glenn T. Suddaby of the Northern District of New York denied the preliminary injunction motion and dismissed the case for lack of standing in an August 31 decision. […]
Jake recently covered the Northern District of Texas decision in Firearms Policy Coalition v. McGraw, which struck down Texas’ ban on the public carry of handguns by those under 21 years old. In McGraw, the court reasons that the Second Amendment’s reference to a “well regulated militia” means that the amendment must necessarily protect the […]
Last week, in Firearms Policy Coalition v. McCraw, Judge Mark Pittman of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas struck down a Texas law that prohibited those under 21 from carrying handguns in public. The case illustrates many of the hallmarks that are likely to characterize post-Bruen litigation over contemporary gun laws. […]
Last month, in Board of Regents v. Montana, the Montana Supreme Court unanimously held that the state’s Board of Regents has the exclusive power to regulate firearms on Montana University System (MUS) campuses. The litigation involved a challenge to Montana House Bill No. 102 (HB 102), which would have allowed the possession and carrying of […]
Immediately following the Supreme Court’s decision in Bruen striking down New York’s proper-cause permitting standard, New York Governor Kathy Hochul took to Twitter to call the decision “reckless[]” and “outrageous,” and pledged further action “to keep New Yorkers safe.” Just over one week after the decision was issued, on Friday, July 1, New York state […]
We previously reviewed and commented on Justice Thomas’ opinion for the Court and the three concurrences in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This post is a deeper dive into the dissent, which stridently criticized the Court’s historical-tradition methodology as both dismissive of modern legislative objectives and unworkable in practice. The […]
Jake previously summarized and reviewed Justice Thomas’ opinion for the Court in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen. This post unpacks the three concurrences, which potentially shed light on the scope of the Court’s holding and the “historical tradition” of regulation that will be relevant in future Second Amendment cases. Justice Alito […]
Last month, in Juzumas v. Nassau County, a Second Circuit panel ruled per curiam that New York’s statute governing licenses for firearm possession mandated that the defendant surrender his longarms once his pistol license was revoked. However, because the County policy purporting to implement this policy was unclear, the Court vacated the district court’s ruling […]
On June 23, 2022, the Supreme Court issued its first major Second Amendment decision in a dozen years. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Court declared New York’s restrictive may-issue licensing law unconstitutional. The 6-3 decision written by Justice Thomas supercharges the Second Amendment and upends a host of settled […]
Yesterday the Supreme Court issued its Bruen decision, holding that NY’s strict concealed carry law is unconstitutional and mandating that lower courts assess Second Amendment claims by reference only to history. We’ll be writing much more about it here, but today we have the Center’s annual firearms law works-in-progress workshop, so I’ll just post a link […]
As we await the Supreme Court’s decision in NYSRPA v. Bruen—which will address the extent to which states can regulate public carry through licensing—the question of whether states can prohibit firearms in specific locations has become increasingly salient. During the Bruen oral argument, the justices posed hypothetical questions as to whether states could restrict firearms […]
The title of Saul Cornell’s recent blog post—The Myth of Non-enforcement of Gun Laws in Nineteenth Century America—leaves the impression that I will argue that nineteenth-century gun restrictions went unenforced. I will make no such argument. In some places, laws regulating the carrying of weapons were enforced strictly. In others, they were ignored. Some authorities […]
In his Bruen oral argument, former solicitor general Paul Clement erroneously claimed that there was no evidence of enforcement of restrictive gun laws before the Civil War. The non-enforcement thesis is the latest example of ideology distorting Second Amendment scholarship. Indeed, during the oral argument in Bruen, Justice Breyer took the unusual step of characterizing […]
