What might be called an unintentional admission by New York City officials that they know they’ve crossed the line against the constitutional rights of Big Apple gun owners recently occurred and was duly reported by the New York Times.
In a story headlined “Fearing Supreme Court Loss, New York Tries to Make Gun Case Vanish,” the city’s dilemma was spelled out.
The Supreme Court of the United States earlier this year accepted a challenge of the city’s incredibly restrictive handgun regulation that prohibits a licensed handgun owner from taking his or her sidearm out of their residence to anywhere other than one of the local gun ranges. They can’t take the gun on vacation, or to a competition or even a training course outside the city.
The restriction is being challenged by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, with support from the National Rifle Association. When the city filed a motion in April to delay the proceedings, the NRA called it a “desperate attempt” to avoid what many observers believe will be a Supreme Court slap down of New York gun control, and that—anti-gunners apparently fear—could open the floodgates for more challenges of other gun control laws nationwide, same as the 2010 McDonald ruling did by incorporating the Second Amendment to the states via the 14th Amendment.
The Blaze, reacting to Monday’s New York Times article, recalled the public hearing hastily put together by New York officials eager to change the law and avoid having the high court tell the city what it may have known all along, that the travel regulation is unconstitutional. The Blaze quoted a remark from one woman who wrote to city officials, “This law should not be changed. Not because it is a good law; it is blatantly unconstitutional. No, it should not be changed since this is a clear tactic to try to moot the SCOTUS case that is specifically looking into this law.”
Even the Times article admitted, “The city, fearing a loss that would endanger gun control laws across the nation, responded by moving to change the regulation.”
Such reports make it clear why liberals did not want either Neil Gorsuch or Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court. They are terrified that the presence of these two conservatives might motivate Chief Justice John Roberts to open the door to more Second Amendment-based gun law challenges, resulting in what nationally-recognized gun rights advocate Alan Gottlieb has called a campaign to “make the Second Amendment great again.” Gottlieb’s Second Amendment Foundation has adopted as its slogan, “Winning firearms freedom one lawsuit at a time.”
He recently told Liberty Park Press that about 80 percent of all the legal gun rights advancements so far have been the work of SAF and its attorneys. It was SAF’s 2010 victory in McDonald v. City of Chicago that made this possible.
Since McDonald, the high court has been reluctant to accept other Second Amendment cases, even to the point of having Associate Justice Clarence Thomas assert that the Second Amendment has been treated as a second-class right.
New York’s scramble to head off a Supreme Court ruling could be proof positive that the gun control zealots realize they have been in the wrong all along. For decades, gun owners have been forced to jump through an increasing number of hoops just to exercise a right set down in the federal constitution and most state constitutions. Perhaps that is about to change, and that may be precisely what the gun prohibitionists fear the most.
