The liberty to keep and bear arms is no “second-class right,” the Supreme Court tried to make clear. Then again, too, New York Democrats aren’t getting the message. How else to explain Albany’s latest scheme to infringe on the right to bear arms in the Empire State? The idea is to require warning signs at all gun shops in New York State alerting potential buyers of the risks of owning a firearm. Governor Hochul is weighing whether to sign the bill.

The legislature would require retailers to warn customers that “access to a weapon or firearm in the home” runs the risk of woes including “the risk of suicide,” “death during domestic disputes,” and even “unintentional deaths to children.” The mandatory signage would urge any would-be gun buyers “experiencing distress and/or depression” to “call the national suicide prevention life-line.” Anything, in short, to prevent a sale.

What next? Will harridans in Albany be putting up signs outside our houses of worship warning of the potential hazards of attending religious services, a right vouchsafed by the First Amendment? Or disclaimers cautioning defendants in court about the downside of choosing a trial by jury, a right enshrined in the Sixth Amendment? What, then, gives lawmakers the idea that this nanny-state intrusion on the Second Amendment is defensible?

“We have warnings on cigarette boxes, we have warnings on bottles of alcohol,” is how the legislation’s sponsor in the state senate, Deputy Majority Leader Michael Gianaris, justifies the measure. “And I would argue that a gun, when used irresponsibly, is much more dangerous than either of those products.” Whatever hopes Philip Morris might harbor, though, the Constitution has yet to declare a right to the unfettered use of tobacco. 

As far as any Constitutional privilege to consume alcoholic beverages — or “intoxicating liquors,” as the 18th Amendment termed them, that’s a long story. Prohibition, after all, is a cautionary tale as much for those who would take a swig of the demon rum as it is for those who would seek to loose the federal leviathan against carrying a pistol. Mr. Gianaris, undeterred, eyes the signs as a “public education campaign,” Spectrum News says.

The warning signs are but the latest affront to the Second Amendment in New York, the state that emerged in the wrong in the Bruen case, which vindicated the right to keep and bear arms against local overregulation. The Nine struck down an Empire State law that had made it nigh-impossible for law-abiding citizens to bear a firearm outside the home. Albany Democrats then defied the court and passed a new law to achieve the same goal.

This contempt for the Second Amendment is a far cry from the spirit of those New Yorkers who in 1788 voted to ratify the Constitution. At that point, though, the Second Amendment — the palladium of our liberty * — was as yet unwritten. The convention at Poughkeepsie, “having also seriously and deliberately considered the present situation of the United States,” urged the adoption of a right to gun ownership — posthaste.

The New York convention observed in its message of ratification “That the People have a right to keep and bear Arms; that a well regulated Militia, including the body of the People capable of bearing Arms, is the proper, natural and safe defence of a free State.” The flinty patriots of 1788 could hardly have imagined  future New Yorkers seeking to exercise such a fundamental right being confronted by Governor Hochul with a warning sign. 

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* The phrase used for the Second Amendment by Judge St. George Tucker and, later, by Justice Joseph Story.