NEW YORK (AP) – When the US Supreme Court lifted New York’s strict restrictions on who can carry a gun, liberal leaders and activists erupted in condemnation.
But some public defenders, often allies of progressive activists, praised the court’s ruling, saying gun regulations like those in New York have long been a license to racial discrimination.
By making it a crime for most people to carry a gun, New York and several other states eventually put people – mostly colored people – behind bars for behavior that would be legal elsewhere, defense attorneys complain.
“New York’s gun licensing regulations are arbitrary and discriminatory, disproportionately involving the people we represent, most of whom are from colored communities,” said The Legal Aid Society, which represents defendants who cannot afford their own lawyers. .
Thursday’s court ruling relates to a century-old law that requires New Yorkers seeking gun licenses to show an unusual threat to their safety if they want to carry a gun in a public place.
The mere desire for a personal protection pistol was not enough. And police departments or judicial magistrates were given a wide margin of discretion to decide who needed and deserved to bear arms.
Reasons may include a retired law enforcement officer or working as an armed guard or in a business that carries valuables. Several other countries have similar standards.
The Supreme Court, in the opinion of the majority of Judge Clarence Thomas, said that the New York system violated the right of the Second Amendment to Americans to “hold and bear arms.”
The governor of New York and the mayor of New York, both Democrats, quickly began looking for other potential guardrails. Governor Kathy Hochul plans to meet with state lawmakers later this month to push for new weapons safety legislation.
Ideas include banning them in certain areas, such as the subway, or requiring gun training to get permission. Officials say it is dangerous to make it easier to carry a weapon. They envision more disputes turning into deadly confrontations at a time when the nation is already gripped by gun violence.
Some civil rights leaders agree. Rev. Al Sharpton called the Supreme Court ruling “devastating,” and the National City League and the NAACP Legal Protection Fund said it was especially for blacks.
In a report by a friend of the court, the two groups cited statistics showing that black Americans, especially black teenage men and young men, die from shootings at a higher rate than whites or the general population.
“If the Supreme Court was actively looking for a way to make the nation more unstable and dangerous, it could not have come up with a more destructive scenario,” League President Mark Morial said after the ruling.
But lawyers from nearly a dozen agencies and advocacy organizations in New York cited other statistics.
Black people faced 78% of allegations of gun ownership in the state last year, while accounting for 18% of its population – compared to 7% of prosecutions and 70% of the population for non-Hispanic whites, said the defenders in their own friend – a court report. More than 90 percent of those arrested in New York on charges of possession of loaded firearms are black and / or Latin American, according to documents, although non-Hispanic whites make up nearly one-third of the city’s population.
Proponents argue that the numbers are rooted in a history of racist concerns about racial and ethnic minorities who own firearms, and are aided by “an expensive and burdensome discretionary licensing process.”
According to statistics from the New York Police Department, about 3,500 civilians in the city of 8.5 million have licenses to “carry business”, and another 2,000 guards have permits to carry weapons at work. About 15,000 retired law enforcement officials have a type of license that is specific to them. The department did not provide a breakdown of licensees by race.
“While white people across the nation are stockpiling arsenals of firearms, even as a hobby, blacks and Latin American New Yorkers have been arrested, persecuted and imprisoned simply for possessing a single self-defense pistol,” several authors wrote in an article. from October on Scotusblog, a legal news site.
One of the accused was a working father and a student who was carrying a gun in a neighborhood where he was cut in the face; he eventually spent eight months in prison and left college, according to defenders. Another man contracted COVID-19 and died last fall while in jail on $ 100,000 bail in a lawsuit alleging a gun in his car, which he denied.
Another defendant, a military veteran who served in Iraq and legally owns a gun in her home state of Texas, was arrested for having a gun in her car in New York. She was in jail for weeks before making bail, and was subjected to a child neglect procedure that kept her away from her two little boys for a year. The criminal case was eventually dropped.
“I lost everything: my job, my car, my home and my children,” she said in court.
In Chicago, Cook County Public Defender Sharon Mitchell Jr. became convinced that Illinois firearms laws – which are strict but do not include the New York-style “right cause” standard – do less to keep guns out of the streets. than to put people in jail. A quarter of his cases involve no charges other than possession of a weapon.
“We have a problem with the weapon, period. But failed policies are part of the problem, “Mitchell said in a statement following the Supreme Court ruling in New York. “These laws facilitate racially motivated enforcement, which sends thousands of black people to prison because they do not have or cannot obtain the necessary licenses, not because they have been accused of harming someone.”
The Supreme Court has said that states may still require licenses and may impose certain conditions, and New York and other states with similar laws will certainly consider carefully what leeway they still have.
But some public advocates suggest that lawmakers should have a broader view of gun safety.
“Regulation and criminalization are not our only options,” said Corey Stoton, a lawyer with the Legal Aid Society who focuses on legislative and regulatory reform. She points to approaches such as intervention programs against violence.
“If we want to reduce weapons, we have to make people feel safe,” Stowton said. “And we have ways that are positive approaches to investing in our communities and making people feel more secure.”
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