Apparently, the state of New York enjoyed getting spanked by the Supreme Court. They liked it so much, they passed an all-new gun law that almost looks tailormade to make it happen all over again.
There are, of course, challenges to the law.
Now, a GOP congressional candidate is filing his own challenge as well.
A federal lawsuit challenging part of New York’s new gun laws was filed by Republican congressional candidate Carl Paladino.
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The lawsuit filed Monday in federal court in Buffalo takes aim at the law’s provision that will bar people from bringing guns into private businesses unless the owners put up signs saying guns are welcome.
New York’s regulation in this regard is a major departure from how many other states handle this. In those states, the idea is that the default position is that one can carry a gun into a business unless that establishment explicitly forbids it.
That position makes some degree of sense. After all, one should be able to assume their rights are respected unless otherwise specified.
But New York’s gun law takes the position that your rights are irrelevant unless the establishment explicitly says otherwise.
This is a departure, but is it constitutional?
To be fair, unlike a lot of other post-Bruen gun laws, this doesn’t explicitly fly in the face of what the Court ruled. This is all new ground, really, and I’m not completely sure how the lower courts are going to rule on this one.
After all, the decision is still, ultimately, on the business itself. It simply shifts the default from “carry permitted” to the other.
Understand, I’m not supportive of this. I’m merely speculating on where the Court will fall on the issue.
Paladino’s lawsuit, though, is interesting and it will be fascinating to see where it ends up. Especially since we know that New York’s law is designed specifically to basically make concealed carry untenable for New York residents. By resetting the default like this, they’re counting on the apathy of many businesses to make it so there are almost no places where carry is legal in hopes it will discourage concealed carry.
Yet what the New York gun law doesn’t account for is that criminals won’t care. They’ve never cared.
So you’ll do nothing to combat crime, but you will successfully deter law-abiding gun owners from being in a position to defend themselves, thus costing many of them their lives.
New York’s gun law is nothing but a political tantrum, an attempt to pretend the Supreme Court “isn’t the boss of them,” even as we know they do, indeed, have to do what they’re told.
My hope is that these challenges reproduce the Bruen slapdown and New York eventually learns that, whether lawmakers like it or not, they have to respect the right to keep and bear arms for its citizens and should stop trying to find ways to make the exercise of it untenable for law-abiding New Yorkers.
I’m not holding my breath on that happening, mind you, but I can still hope.