Supreme Court Makes a Move In Support of 2nd Amendment

Supreme Court Makes a Move In Support of 2nd Amendment

A few months ago, a 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court of the United States decided that New York’s concealed carry statute violated the Second Amendment. This was the most significant pro-Second Amendment judgment the court had given in nearly two decades.

Experts think the verdict is significant because it suggests similar challenges to stringent concealed carry laws will be successful, even if they are confined to blue states. MPR remarked that This decision is a huge deal. The court had previously only said that the right to own a pistol in one’s house for self-defense was guaranteed by the Constitution. The justices did not address the issue of how to restrict weapons carried outside the home in that 2008 ruling. It took the Supreme Court nearly 15 years to revisit the issue, but they finally did so in this case.

In the majority opinion for Thursday’s verdict, Justice Clarence Thomas said that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a pistol for self-defense outside the home   FiveThirtyEight elaborated that this meant that those who desired a license to carry a concealed firearm in public no longer needed to “prove they have a legitimate reason. The report continues by speculating that jurisdictions with similarly stringent concealed carry laws will experience a “flood” of new cases.

Though this landmark decision was decided by the Supreme Court, it was not the only Second Amendment case decided by the court, and the court certainly opened the way to much of the anticipated additional litigation. According to the Western Journal on Thursday, after its significant ruling in a gun case last week, the Supreme Court ruled Thursday that cases regarding limitations in Hawaii, California, New Jersey, and Maryland deserve a new look.

The Supreme Court has instructed lower courts to reevaluate numerous pending cases in light of last week’s verdict, which declared that Americans have a right to carry a gun outside the home. The outlet reported that the cases involved “high-capacity magazines, an assault weapons ban, and a state law that limits who can carry a gun outside the home and that by sending the cases back to lower courts while these laws will now get a second look under the new standard applied in Thomas’ majority decision.

The Supreme Court of the United States has ordered federal appeals courts to reconsider two state laws that limit the number of bullets a magazine can hold; these are in California and New Jersey. New Jersey’s Democratic governor, Phil Murphy, put into law in 2018 a reduction in the maximum capacity of magazines from 15 to 10. An earlier court had sided with the law’s supporters. Meanwhile, California legislation prohibits the possession of magazines with a capacity of more than ten rounds, and a panel of eleven judges on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided 7-4 last year to sustain the prohibition.

Another case from Maryland appealing a ban on 45 types of so-called “assault” weapons in that state was remanded back to the appeals court by the justices. A challenge to that law was rejected by the Supreme Court in 2017. Thomas’s judgment “says rules need to be historically consistent with the Second Amendment,” according to FiveThirtyEight’s analysis.

That means courts will have to research the legislative history of the United States to determine if legislation substantially identical to new gun regulation was enacted at an earlier time. Before, courts also thought about whether a rule could be justified for other reasons. Now, that second layer of thinking isn’t allowed,” the site said.