This pistol permit in my pocket from the state of New York has the words “Type: Full Carry” next to my photo. This hard plastic card is the state’s approval of my use of a right that’s specifically protected from government infringement by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights. I focus on the words “full carry” every time I look at the thing. Though I used to find these two words superfluous, now that this is a “sensitive-place” state, I find them both sarcastic and frightening.
Around me, others who carry such permits have similar reactions to the surreal and disturbing situation in which the state has placed us.
If you don’t know New York state, you likely don’t know that “upstate” is like much of the middle of the nation—though precisely where upstate begins and downstate (as in New York City and its suburbs) ends is subjective. We are in a congressional district that has flipped between pro- and anti-Second Amendment politicians for decades. “Repeal the SAFE Act” signs are on nearby country roads. Gun ownership is common here. But it is just as common—or slightly more so—not to have a gun in one’s household. We are a mix of equal parts red and blue. We are purple.
I walk into my local New York gun shops—there are many, but they are mostly small and as eclectic as their owners—and ask, “Is this is a sensitive place now?”
The managers or owners laugh, but also shake their heads. They know me and are aware that I am being both sardonic and factual. I want to name them, and to tell you more about their shops, but I think it poor form to do so; the Biden administration’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has, after all, been searching their records for paperwork errors they can use as justification to yank these stores’ Federal Firearms Licenses.
I also don’t want to say if any of these shops have hung signs informing people that law-abiding citizens can carry on their premises—this is something the state’s Concealed Carry Improvement Act (CCIA) (passed as an anti-Second Amendment retort to Bruen) said private stores must do for people to be able to carry concealed in them. (This last mandate was, as this was going to print, temporarily stopped by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. But other mandated language for signs that must be hung inside such shops—in this case repeating gun-control group talking points—had not been stopped by a court.)
So, as “full-carry” citizens in a state that now deems nearly every public place to be too sensitive for our constitutionally protected rights—public parks, public transportation, many streets, buildings owned by the public and much more are off limits to us—despite our new “right” to carry, we are still exercising a distinctly second-class right. In defiance of clear direction from the Supreme Court, the state government continues to ignore our Second Amendment.
Friends from my gun club who live in nearby Westchester County, New York, and who have had pistol permits for years (in many cases, for decades), are now being forced to pay for and take in-person, 16-hour gun-safety courses and to go through other onerous steps to keep their state-issued carry permits.
State-mandated signs at the club now tell members they can no longer let anyone who doesn’t have a New York state pistol permit handle or shoot a handgun. I have not seen anyone asking to see others’ permits and I can’t imagine being forced to act as an agent of the state to simply shoot with friends and family, but this is the position the state is putting resident gun owners and visitors in (many members of my club are from nearby states).
Now, those shaking their heads and wondering why they should continue to read a New York-centric article should realize that New York is among a handful of states that are now at the epicenter for this civil-rights struggle. How the courts adjudicate these new, post-Bruen gun-control laws in New York, as well as in New Jersey, Illinois, California and a few other states, does matter nationally, as these laws can be (and already have been) used as legal templates by other state and local officials who want to similarly infringe on citizens’ Second Amendment rights.
The American Struggle
And this is already a national story, as America’s concealed-carry laws are a complicated patchwork in which freedom begins and ends at many state lines.
Yes, a lot of freedom has been won in recent years thanks, in part, to advocacy from this association of freedom-loving Americans. We now have, for example, 29 constitutional-carry states that get the government out of the way of our Second Amendment-protected right to bear arms.
Also, the U.S. Supreme Court, in the previously mentioned NRA-backed case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), ruled that, yes indeed, our Second Amendment freedom does extend outside of our homes. This case has and is being used to challenge unconstitutional infringements on this right across the nation.
But, without a national reciprocity law (a law President Donald Trump (R) told us he would sign) ensuring that law-abiding citizens who can lawfully carry in their home state can carry concealed where it is legal to do so in other states and the District of Columbia, this critical right is being severed. (Actually, it is more than being severed, as such restrictions have been used by state officials to arrest and prosecute nonresidents who accidentally carried handguns across state lines.)
Indeed, nonresidents cannot carry openly or concealed in New York state. Even residents, as previously noted, who have “pistol licenses” labeled “full carry” in the state cannot currently carry in most of the state due to expansive “sensitive-place” restrictions put in place by New York’s Orwellian-named Concealed Carry Improvement Act.
The Increasing Legal Battles Over Carry
Last October, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that much of the CCIA can be enforced by the state of New York, though two provisions could not be as court challenges continue.
Specifically, New York’s CCIA makes it a crime for a person to carry a gun on private property “where such person knows or reasonably should know that the owner or lessee of such property has not permitted such possession by clear and conspicuous signage indicating that the carrying of firearms, rifles or shotguns on their property is permitted or by otherwise giving express consent.” The court tabled this provision for now, as forced speech is a clear First Amendment violation.
Several court decisions have also found that New York state could not enforce a requirement from the CCIA forcing handgun-license applicants to provide their social-media passwords and other information to state officials, as this is an obvious First Amendment violation.
The courts, however, have allowed the state to continue to require handgun owners to be of “good moral character.” The trouble with this requirement is deciding who has a “good moral character” is subjective; indeed, it could be used by a licensing official to disqualify citizens from their Second Amendment right to bear arms because the citizen has the “wrong” politics or for any other rationale an official might arbitrarily think makes them a bad person.
The state is also allowed to mandate that people applying to use this constitutionally protected right must provide information on household members, must attend an in-person interview with a licensing official and must take a 16-hour, in-person firearms-safety course.
In the most-recent court ruling, New York state has also been allowed to continue to enforce laws that ban guns from being carried in all the now “sensitive” places. When I ask other New York gun owners if they still dare to navigate around the public square as they carry concealed, they pause. They don’t want to answer. The state has yet to arrest and prosecute a concealed carrier for the crime of climbing a mountain in the state’s vast Catskill or Adirondack Parks or for carrying in many other now legally off-limits-to-carry areas, but the thought of being thrust into the criminal justice system is excruciating.
Actually, this gun-control package was so ill-thought-out that New York state’s Department of Environmental Conservation had to come out with a long and logically twisted explanation to try to tell hunters how they can legally carry guns on public lands.
Perhaps state officials prefer to use the law to shun and smother this freedom, but do not want to defend the unconstitutional law in court. This, after all, is how the state has treated its ban on commonly owned semi-automatic rifles. Whatever the case, it places concealed carriers in a complex patchwork of legally perilous and surreal situations.
All this could have been avoided even by anti-gun legislators, as the majority opinion in Bruen—written by Justice Clarence Thomas—saw this misuse of the law coming and gave this guidance:
[C]ourts can use analogies to “longstanding” “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings” to determine whether modern regulations are constitutionally permissible. That said, respondents’ attempt to characterize New York’s proper-cause requirement as a “sensitive-place” law lacks merit because there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a “sensitive place” simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.
The majority opinion also found that:
[W]e do think respondents err in their attempt to characterize New York’s proper-cause requirement as a “sensitive-place” law. In their view, “sensitive places” where the government may lawfully disarm law-abiding citizens include all “places where people typically congregate and where law-enforcement and other public-safety professionals are presumptively available.” It is true that people sometimes congregate in “sensitive places,” and it is likewise true that law enforcement professionals are usually presumptively available in those locations. But expanding the category of “sensitive places” simply to all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement defines the category of “sensitive places” far too broadly.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul (D) and a majority in the state’s legislature, nevertheless, saw an opening in now former Justice Stephen Breyer’s dissent in Bruen and decided to drive an almost-complete ban on public carry through it.
Justice Breyer wrote:
The Court affirms Heller’s recognition that States may forbid public carriage in “sensitive places.” But what, in 21st-century New York City, may properly be considered a sensitive place? Presumably “legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses,” which the Court tells us were among the “relatively few” places “where weapons were altogether prohibited” in the 18th and 19th centuries. On the other hand, the Court also tells us that “expanding the category of ‘sensitive places’ simply to all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement defines th[at] category ... far too broadly.” So where does that leave the many locations in a modern city with no obvious 18th- or 19th-century analogue? What about subways, nightclubs, movie theaters, and sports stadiums? The Court does not say.
Actually, as previously noted, the Court did attempt to narrow the scope of these restrictions by warning what would be considered “far too” broad; however, as it is a conservative-leaning Court, a majority of the justices (6-3) did leave creating such a list of restricted areas to legislators, though the Court did require them to have “historical precursors” to justify any sensitive-place restriction. The Court also noted that there were “relatively few” such places historically.
Further, as previously noted, this is not just happening in New York. Legislators in California, New Jersey, Illinois and several other states have also passed expansive sensitive-place restrictions on this constitutional right. In each, the NRA has been ready to challenge them on constitutional grounds.
A lot of legal challenges have been filed and must be filed in order to force states to get out of the way of the peoples’ freedom. As these legal fights continue, Hochul, Calif. Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who wants a constitutional amendment to terminate the Second Amendment, and other officials have been defiant in the face of the high court and the people’s will.
“In response to the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down New York’s century-old concealed-carry law, we took swift and thoughtful action to keep New Yorkers safe,” said Gov. Hochul. “I refuse to surrender my right as governor to protect New Yorkers from gun violence ... .”
Like many anti-gun legislators, she conflates “gun violence” with lawfully armed concealed carriers. She must be aware that concealed carriers rarely commit crimes. She might even be aware—as the data is clear—that law-abiding armed citizens stop a lot of illegally armed violent criminals each year in America. Nevertheless, Hochul likes to pretend that making it all but impossible for citizens to defend themselves in public makes people safer.
And, after the October court ruling allowed much of New York’s new gun-control regime to stand, New York Attorney General Letitia James (D) released this statement: “This decision is another victory in our effort to protect all New Yorkers from the scourge of gun violence. After repeated attempts to weaken our gun safety regulations, once again we have prevailed. Commonsense gun safety legislation helps protect New Yorkers, and my office will always stand up to defend these laws. As Attorney General, I will use all the tools at my disposal to help remove dangerous weapons from New York communities ... .”
Of course, the laws she is referring to are written to regulate law-abiding citizens’ behavior, not the criminals she also conflates with those who lawfully carry concealed. But then, to her, the law-abiding are the problem.
So, yes, life is onerous and surreal in sensitive-place states these days. The trouble for every American is, if freedom does not prevail in court even in New York, such court decisions could be used to impact other parts of the country.
