Conservative-Leaning SCOTUS Breaking 9-Year Silence on Gun Rights
With a solidly conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the nation’s highest court will take up a gun rights case for the first time in nine years, Newsmax reported.
The high court will hear arguments about New York City’s prohibition on transporting a licensed, locked and unloaded handgun outside the city limits.
However, the case will likely not reach the court until October of this year, according to Newsmax.
The appeal was filed by three residents of New York, in association with New York’s National Rifle Association, and will be the first case of its kind before the Supreme Court since 2010.
U.S. Supreme Court to hear major New York gun rights case https://t.co/kUshEfQpGV pic.twitter.com/FtRX81OHMN
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) January 22, 2019
According to CNN, the city currently “blocks licensed individuals from removing a handgun from the address listed on the license except to travel to nearby authorized small arms range/shooting clubs.”
One of the residents bringing the case, Romolo Colantone, argued that he wished to be able to take his handgun to his second home in Handcock, N.Y., to protect himself and his family there, The Hill reported.
Colantone and the other handgun owners listed in the case claim that the city’s ban violates the Second Amendment and the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, according to The Hill.
The challengers are represented by attorney Paul Clement, who has urged the high court’s justices to clarify the extent of the constructional gun rights that were decided in cases in 2008 and 2010.
This would be the first “substantive” gun rights case to be heard since Justice Antonin Scalia’s landmark opinion in 2008 “that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to keep a gun at home and a follow up case in 2010,” CNN’s reported.
The challengers’ attorney said he believes that this case “is a perfect vehicle to reaffirm that those decisions and the constitutional text have consequences.”
The current makeup of the court might back him up.
As The Hill reported: “The court’s willingness to take the case is significant given the justices have, for years, avoided weighing in on challenges to state and local gun restrictions. President Trump’s appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to replace the court’s swing vote, Justice Anthony Kennedy, however, has solidified a new conservative majority on the court.”
In 2017, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote his opinion on the high court’s decision not to hear a Second Amendment related case:
“For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous,” Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a June 2017 opinion.
“But the framers made a clear choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by idly while a state denies its citizens that right, particularly when their very lives may depend on it.”
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