New York’s Democrats tacked up signs naming a newly-expanded Times Square a “Gun Free Zone,” but don’t expect them to stay long. That’s the takeaway from a federal judge’s rebuke of the Empire State’s new gun law. The restrictions were rushed into law at Albany after the Supreme Court vindicated New Yorkers’ Second Amendment rights in June. Judge Glenn Suddaby has found the new state law to be “unconstitutional.” 

The Supreme Court ruling, designed to free New Yorkers to exercise their constitutional right to “keep and bear arms,” put an end to the Empire State regime that required applicants to prove to a state official a valid reason to carry a handgun outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas’ opinion noted there is “no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.”

Before the Court struck down New York’s gun restrictions, state residents who filed suit complained, it was “virtually impossible for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to obtain a license.” Yet far from embracing the freedom ordained by the high court and working to expand licensing to allow law-abiding citizens to exercise their Second Amendment rights, New York’s Democrats immediately began plotting to defy the high court.

Mayor Adams, disregarding the crime wave that is plaguing Gotham, vowed to spite the ruling and limit the places where guns could be carried. “We cannot allow New York to become the Wild West,” he said. Governor Hochul was worse. She vowed a “higher threshold” for a permit to carry a handgun outside the home. Sure enough, these measures entered into law at a special session of the legislature at Albany.

The new law reflects the same spirit of defiance to the Supreme Court — and the Constitution — that Southern segregationists displayed after Brown v. Board of Education. The old gun law required permit applicants to prove a “need” to carry a gun. Instead, they now must meet a new burden: proving they have “the essential character, temperament and judgment necessary to be entrusted with a weapon” — decided by the state, of course.

It’s the burden of proof that’s wrong. If the right to keep and bear arms is to mean anything, it is that the right pre-exists the state. It is the state that is forbidden from denying the right. So the applicant needn’t prove anything. The logical way for it to work is that if the state feels an applicant lacks the character to keep and bear, then the state must prove it, and before an independent body. Otherwise, the permit must be issued.

That’s nothing new. In every criminal case, the burden is solely on the state to prove guilt. In addition to getting the burden wrong, New York’s new gun law bars permit holders from carrying in a list of “sensitive places.”  So long is the list that gun owners commit a felony by inadvertently entering a store that failed to post a sign saying gun owners are permitted. Or by strolling down the wrong street and crossing into Times Square.  

That intersection in Manhattan was once confined to the blocks where Broadway meets West 42nd Street. No longer. The city, keen to curb gun owners,  redesignated Times Square to range from West 40th Street to West 53rd Street between Ninth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. Even the gun-rights-hating New York Times reports: “For many New Yorkers, the new definition defies both common sense and lived experience.”

The law may not be long on the books. Gun rights advocates had sought to block the law from going into effect today. Judge Suddaby found the plaintiffs lacked for standing. Yet he decried the lawmakers’ “haste to pass a legislative response to the Supreme Court’s decision.” They produced a law “less like a measured response than a wish list of exercise-inhibiting restrictions glued together by a severability clause.”