WASHINGTON (AP) – With a significant expansion of gun rights, the Supreme Court said Thursday that Americans have the right to carry firearms publicly for self-defense, a decision that is likely to lead to more people legally armed in cities and beyond. The decision came with the recent mass shootings, fresh in the minds of the nation, and gun control, which is being discussed in Congress and the United States.
About a quarter of the US population lives in states that are expected to be affected by the decision, which repealed the gun law in New York. The Supreme Court’s first major arms decision in more than a decade came in a 6-3 split with the court’s Conservatives in the majority and the Liberals in disagreement.
On the other side of the street in the Capitol, Congress hastened to pass its own gun legislation following the mass shootings in Texas, New York and California. The senators cleared the way for his measure, modest in scope but still the most extensive in decades.
Also Thursday, stressing the nation’s deep division on the issue, the sister of a 9-year-old girl killed in a school shooting in Uwalde, Texas, is urging Austin state lawmakers to pass gun legislation that would run counter to the Republican … restrictions by the supervised body in recent years.
President Joe Biden said in a statement that he was “deeply disappointed” by the Supreme Court’s decision, which he said “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution and should deeply concern us all”.
He called on the states to pass new laws and said: “I call on Americans across the country to hear their voices on gun safety. Life is at stake. ”
The court ruling overturned a law in New York that required people to demonstrate a special need to carry a weapon in order to obtain a license to carry in public. The judges said the requirement violated the Second Amendment’s right to “hold and carry a weapon.”
Judge Clarence Thomas wrote for the majority that the Constitution protects “the right of the individual to carry a self-defense pistol outside the home.” This right is not a “second class right,” Thomas wrote. “We do not know of any other constitutional right that a person can exercise only after demonstrating to civil servants a special need.
California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have laws similar to those in New York.
New York Governor Katie Hochul said the decision comes at a particularly painful time when New York is still mourning the deaths of 10 people in a mass shooting at a supermarket in Buffalo. “This decision is not just reckless. This is reprehensible. “It’s not what New Yorkers want,” she said.
But Tom King, president of the plaintiff at the State Association of Rifles and Pistols in New York, said he was relieved.
“The rightful and legitimate owner of a gun in New York State will no longer be prosecuted by laws that have nothing to do with human security and will do nothing to make people safer,” he said. “And maybe now we will start prosecuting criminals and perpetrators of these heinous acts.”
The court’s decision is somewhat inconsistent with public opinion. About half of voters in the 2020 presidential election said gun laws in the United States should be tightened, according to AP VoteCast, an extensive electoral survey. An additional third said the laws should be kept as they are, while only about 1 in 10 said gun laws should be less stringent.
About 8 out of 10 Democrat voters said gun laws should be tightened, VoteCast reported. Approximately half of Republican voters said the laws should be followed as they are, while the other half are closely divided between more and less strict ones.
In a disagreement that was joined by his Liberal counterparts on Thursday, Judge Stephen Brier focused on the consequences of gun violence. “Since the beginning of this year alone (2022), there have been 277 reported mass shootings – an average of more than one per day,” Breyer wrote.
Proponents of the law in New York say removing it would lead to more guns on the streets and a higher rate of violent crime. Violence with firearms, which was already on the rise during the coronavirus pandemic, has escalated again.
In most parts of the country, gun owners do not find it difficult to legally carry their weapons in public. But it was harder to do in New York and a handful of states with similar laws. New York law, in force since 1913, states that in order to carry a concealed pistol in a public place, a person applying for a license must show a “correct reason,” a specific need to carry a weapon.
The state issues unlimited licenses under which a person can carry a weapon anywhere and limited licenses that allow a person to carry a weapon, but only for specific purposes such as hunting and shooting at targets or to and from the place of work.
The challenge to the law in New York was made by the New York State Association for Rifles and Pistols, which is described as the oldest organization for the protection of firearms in the nation, and two men looking for unlimited ability to carry weapons outside their homes.
The Supreme Court last issued a major weapons decision in 2010. In this decision and a 2008 decision, judges established a nationwide right to keep weapons at home for self-defense. The question to the court this time was about carrying one outside the home. Thomas wrote in his opinion that: “Nothing in the text of the Second Amendment distinguishes between home and society as regards the right to hold and bear arms.”
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Associated Press reporters Mark Sherman, Hannah Fingerhut and Zeke Miller in Washington and Michael Hill of East Greenbush, New York, contributed to the report.
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