The Supreme Court’s New Gun Ruling Means Virtually No Gun Law Is Safe Under New York State Rifle v. Bruen
More guns were never going to be the right answer.
The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen is a devastating decision for anyone who cares about reducing gun violence.
It massively expands the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”
The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — are likely to proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”
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