New York City decided to change a portion of its gun laws related to the transport of firearms just a few months after the Supreme Court decided to review a lawsuit scrutinizing the city’s gun control laws.
The changes are expected to go into place following a 30-day public comment period starting next week. Currently, permitted gun owners in New York City can only carry their guns to approved firing ranges or areas where hunting is allowed. The city’s firearm policy change is expected to affect 16,000 licensed gun owners and only residents who live within the city limits.
The firearm must be unloaded when being transported and the ammunition is required to be carried separately. Those mandates will not change.
“This change applies only to legal gun owners who have already gone through a strenuous background verification process,” Police Commissioner James O’Neill said. “The NYPD’s focus will always be on criminals who wield illegal guns, and those who would use guns to cause violence on our streets. Reasonably accommodating the interests of licensed gun owners in transporting their firearms to a legal shooting range or second home strikes a responsible balance between individual interests and public safety.”
Despite the planned rule change before the case is argued, the NRA called the city’s effort a desperate attempt to get the case dismissed by the high court.
“The City of New York clearly knows that its current restrictions on the carrying and transportation of lawfully owned firearms are unconstitutional and will fail under any standard of constitutional review, as the NRA has been saying for years,” the NRA said in a statement.
That is not how things work in the Supreme Court; the Court does not put its review on hold while the government embarks on a journey that at best might fix only a limited part of the constitutional defect. This is nothing more than a naked attempt by New York City to resist Supreme Court review of policies that even New York must recognize as inconsistent with the holdings in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. City of Chicago. The City of New York did not respect its citizens’ Second Amendment rights before the Supreme Court granted review in this case and it will not respect them going forward. We are confident that the Court will reject New York’s desperate attempt to avoid review of its blatantly unconstitutional laws.The state of New York lost in court over its ban on stun guns and tasers last month when a federal judge ruled that the state’s prohibition of the devices by “all citizens for all purposes, even for self-defense in one’s own home, must be declared unconstitutional.”
