A new gun law in New York violates constitutional rights, a federal judge said on Oct. 10 as he blocked it.
“New York fails that test here. Indeed, property owners have the right to exclude. But the state may not unilaterally exercise that right and, thereby, interfere with the long-established Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens who seek to carry for self-defense on private property open to the public,” he wrote.
The decision granted a motion by plaintiffs to permanently block officials in New York from enforcing the law with regard to private property open to the public and denied a request from officials to stay the ruling pending appeal.
The Firearms Policy Coalition, one of the plaintiffs, cheered the development.
“This is yet another important victory for Second Amendment rights and another major loss for New York, authoritarian governments, and radical anti-rights organizations,” the coalition’s president, Brandon Combs, said in an emailed statement.
“We will continue to fight forward as we work to restore the full scope of the right to keep and bear arms throughout the United States,” he added later.
The office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, which defended the law in court, did not respond to a request for comment.
The ruling applies to a range of commonly visited properties, including grocery stores, hotels, parking garages, and cemeteries.
In those locations, it is certainly possible that people will be confronted with situations that require self-defense, Sinatra said. He pointed to several U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have established that the Constitution confers the right to carry guns for self-defense, including outside the home.
“Nothing in the Nation’s history or traditions closes the door on that right across all private property open to the public,” the judge said.
State lawyers had put forth restrictions they said supported the new law, including an 1893 law in Oregon that prohibited people other than law enforcement officers from going onto private property with firearms.
“New York’s current statute addresses a societal problem that has persisted since the founding—namely, interpersonal firearm violence. But the State fails to identify a single relevantly analogous law addressing that problem,” the judge said.
“Instead, the State proffers a collection of enactments aimed at regulating hunting, poaching, and trespassing essentially in relation to the homestead. The proffered analogues were framed on different ‘why’ concerns, and certainly had no ‘how’ methodologies that remotely resemble the State’s expansive private property inversion challenged here.”
As Hochul signed the legislation, she said, “We didn’t throw up our hands and surrender,” referring to the 2022 overturning of a New York law on concealed carry by the Supreme Court. “We fought back. We doubled down. We came up with legislation. And we have a prohibition on concealed carry weapons in sensitive places.”
The new decision, the Firearms Policy Coalition said, “shows that Governor Hochul couldn’t be more wrong.”
