THE SUPREME COURT IS SET TO ISSUE AN INSANE RULING THAT WILL LEAD TO MORE DEAD AMERICANS
Last week, an 18-year-old walked into an elementary school and, as law enforcement officers inexplicably waited outside, murdered 19 children and two teachers. Unless you’ve been cut off from the outside world, you undoubtedly already know this. But the horror seems worth repeating, not only in light of Republicans’
steadfast refusal to do literally anything to stop these types of events from occurring, but
a forthcoming decision from the Supreme Court that is expected to flood the country with even more killing machines.
The case in question is
New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen, which involves a 1913 law that requires someone who wants to carry a concealed gun in public in New York to have a license to do so, and in order to obtain said license, prove that they have “proper cause.”
In New York, that “proper cause” can’t be some vague fear of violence but a credible threat against that person’s life, and one that cannot be mitigated in other ways. Subsequently, it means
the odds of the accountant in line behind you at the Chipotle on Seventh Avenue and 38th Street having a handgun on him is a lot lower than his counterpart in Dallas, where, thanks to Governor Greg Abbott, anyone can carry a gun without a license (or a background check, or training). A lot of people living in New York like this setup and, presumably, the flip side is at least one of the reasons they would choose not to relocate to Texas or one of the other states in this country where conservatives care more about embryos than they do living, breathing things.
But the plaintiffs in NYSRPA v. Bruen are challenging that 1913 law, so that when you go out for lunch in Manhattan, or Brooklyn, or Albany, or Rensselaer—where they hail from—you have you to worry about whether the person sitting next to you is carrying a loaded weapon just for the fuck of it.
The court is due to hand down a ruling by the end of June, but many legal experts say
the verdict is already clear, and the only question at this point is if the court’s conservatives will be giving a large gift to gun nuts or a colossal one. During
oral arguments last November,
the court’s conservative goon squad peppered attorneys with a cornucopia of absurd hypotheticals, arguing that letting people carry a gun on, for instance, a crowded R train is not a public safety threat but an essential constitutional right. Brett Kavanaugh who, like Amy Coney Barrett, was
nominated to the Supreme Court in part due to his firearms-friendly record as a judge—which the Giffords Law Center
describes as “troubling” and “ideologically aligned with the gun lobby”—
wanted to know why someone’s “proper cause” can’t just be “I want to be able to defend myself.”
When plaintiff attorney Paul Clement charitably offered that the law could be struck down while still banning guns in “sensitive places,” but couldn’t answer Justice Elena Kagan’s question re: what, exactly, would constitute a sensitive place, Barrett, doing Clement’s job for him, asked, “Can’t we just say Times Square on New Year’s Eve is a sensitive place? Because now we’ve seen people are on top of each other, we’ve had experience with violence, so we’re making a judgment, it’s a sensitive place.” As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern
wrote at the time,
“it’s pretty cold comfort if New York can only ban guns in one of the most crowded places in the world on its single busiest night.”
But it was arch-conservative Samuel Alito—y’know, the one who likes his abortion laws modeled after those of the 17th century—who did the hardest bidding on behalf of America’s gun enthusiasts, suggesting that the New York law is some kind of cruel and unusual punishment inflicted upon “ordinary law-abiding citizens” who need to carry a gun on them when they ride the New York City subway system, which he painted as a crime-ridden hellhole. Despite having never previously or since shown much concern for the working class, Alito asked New York solicitor general Barbara Underwood:
“I want you to think about people like this, people who work late at night in Manhattan. It might be somebody who cleans offices, it might be a doorman at an apartment, it might be a nurse or an orderly, it might be somebody who washes dishes. None of these people has a criminal record. They’re all law-abiding citizens. They get off work around midnight, maybe even after midnight. They have to commute home by subway, maybe by bus. When they arrive at the subway station or the bus stop,
they have to walk some distance through a high-crime area. And they apply for a license, and they say: ‘Look, nobody has said I’m going to mug you next Thursday. However, there have been a lot of muggings in this area, and I am scared to death.’ They do not get licenses, is that right?” Naturally,
Alito did not respond kindly to Underwood noting that it would be a bad idea to put “a lot of armed people in an enclosed space.”
“It remains to be seen exactly how broad the Supreme Court goes, but one thing is clear:
As mass shootings become more of a political issue, the court is going to take options away from lawmakers on the basis of the Second Amendment,” Adam Winkler, a professor at UCLA School of Law,
told The Hill, noting that
it’s very likely the Supreme Court’s ruling will make it harder for cities to restrict concealed weapons. He added that, despite what you may have heard from gun-rights advocates, arming more “good guys” with guns will not make innocent people any safer— but
pretending that the Second Amendment says something that it doesn’t—like that anyone, anywhere, can carry a gun—will make it significantly more difficult for lawmakers to pass laws aimed at preventing people from being killed. (On a related note—like
most people’s views on Roe versus what the Supreme Court is expected to decide—
most people in the U.S. want more gun restrictions and fewer mass shootings, making the impending ruling from the court even more ridiculous.)
