Does the Second Amendment apply in New York? After the latest decision by a panel of riders of the Second United States Appeals Circuit, one could be forgiven for being uncertain on this head. The riders just upheld — for a second time — a raft of new limits on the right to keep and bear arms in the Empire State. The restrictions were enacted in defiance of the Supreme Court’s vindication of the Second Amendment in the Bruen case.

That was the ruling by the Nine that struck down New York’s decades-long policies making it nearly essentially impossible for law-abiding citizens to  bear arms in the Empire State. Justice Clarence Thomas, in his opinion for the majority, reminded New York Democrats that the Second Amendment is not “a second-class right,” but is, rather, a guarantee of liberty as worthy of respect as the others vouchsafed in the Bill of Rights.

Under that logic, the Nine in 2022 struck down New York’s policies requiring citizens to get permission from a state official to exercise their Second Amendment rights. “We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need,” Justice Thomas wrote. “That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion.” 

Far from being chastened by the Supreme Court’s ruling, Governor Hochul, like a Jim Crow governor, vowed she wouldn’t “back down” in the campaign to limit gun rights. New York Democrats convened within days to enact a new law that used new legal language to restore many of the restrictions deemed unconstitutional by the Nine. Citizens used to have to show a “need” to carry a gun. Now they prove their “good character.” 

The new law, too, deemed swaths of the state to be “sensitive places” where guns can’t be carried. Justice Thomas’s opinion had noted that, historically, “schools and government buildings,” plus “legislative assemblies, polling places, and courthouses,” were places “where weapons were altogether prohibited.” New York Democrats, in their zeal to limit the exercise of the Second Amendment, drove a tractor-trailer through that reasoning. 

The places deemed “sensitive” — and gun-free — includes a long  list of venues, plus Times Square, which was redefined as a tract comprising much of Midtown West. Albany Democrats might as well have come up with a shorter list noting where law-abiding gun owners can carry a gun for self-defense. The New York lawmakers’ refusal to accept the spirit of the high court ruling was, we noted, on a par with Governor Wallace’s stand in the schoolhouse door.

The animosity to the right to keep and bear arms isn’t confined to lawmakers. Earlier this year a state judge, Abena Darkeh, when she was hearing the case of a hobbyist accused of making so-called “ghost guns,” actually stated that in her courtroom the Second Amendment “doesn’t exist.” Said she: “Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York.”

In this hostile climate, it was all the more disappointing when, in December 2023, a panel of riders on the Second Circuit — Judges Dennis Jacobs, Eunice Lee, and Gerard Lynch — let stand most of New York’s new gun restrictions. A few months later, the Supreme Court vacated the circuit riders’ decision and ordered them to reconsider. Wouldn’t you know it, though, when the riders looked over the case, they could find no fault in their own reasoning. 

“We reach the same conclusions that we reached in our prior consolidated opinion,” the judges said. Rather than relying on the logic of Bruen, though, the circuit riders point to a later decision in the case of United States v. Rahimi. The latter case upheld a limit on gun ownership rights for a man accused of domestic abuse. Once again, it looks like an intervention by the Supreme Court will be needed to vindicate New Yorkers’ rights under the Constitution.