Thread by @2Aupdates

NYSRPA v. Bruen (#SCOTUS, 20-843): Reply brief for petitioners

"The state now retreats to the equally indefensible claims that the right vanishes in 'populous areas' and extends only to those with a 'non-speculative need' to exercise it." supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/20/2…

"When the state is not rewriting the historical record, it is attacking arguments petitioners did not make, while defending a law it did not pass and licenses it did not issue."

"The Court should reverse the decision below and hold that petitioners have a right to do what even the state now concedes the Constitution protects: bear arms outside the home for self-defense."

"And neither the state nor any of its amici has been able to identify a single instance before the twentieth century of someone being successfully prosecuted for the bare act of carrying a common firearm for self-defense."

"After insisting for the better part of a decade that its restrictive carry regime does not even implicate the Second Amendment, the state now 'do[es] not dispute' that 'the Second Amendment embodies a right to carry arms outside the home for self-defense.'"

"That new claim is as textually and historically indefensible as the position the state wisely abandoned, and it does not even suffice to defend the state’s actual regime."

"The licenses provide no general authorization to carry for self-defense outside 'populous areas,' and they virtually never allow carrying solely for the purpose of self-defense, which is central to the Second Amendment."

"...across centuries of history pre- and post-dating the Second Amendment, the state cannot identify a single case in which Northampton or its progeny was successfully invoked to prosecute someone for the bare act of carrying a common firearm in public for self-defense. Not one."

"When quoted in full, even the state’s own sources—neither of which merited a mention in Heller’s exhaustive survey of relevant historical materials—refute its central claim."

"Once again, the state responds with truncated citations and misdirection."

"The state is no more faithful in describing early American Northampton-style laws."

"By contrast, its restriction on 'rid[ing] or go[ing] armed with sword, pistol, or dagger' applied only to 'planters,'... 'Many New Jersey "planters" of the time were Scotch-Irish immigrants, a group often disdained by the English.'"

"Those laws are thus of no aid to the state, which makes it crime for petitioners to carry handguns for self-defense in any manner, whether openly or concealed."

"By the state’s lights, all of these founding fathers were scofflaws."

"A state that has deprived the citizenry of the means of armed self-defense has little need to regulate the circumstances in which armed self-defense is lawful."

"Moreover, the state’s characterization of the surety laws is at war with its characterization of Northampton-style laws as categorically prohibiting the carrying of firearms in 'populous areas.'"

"The United States tries to distinguish these cases as 'disapprov[ing] restrictions on openly carrying long guns,' not handguns. That claim is both irrelevant after Heller, and wrong."

"And Tombstone allowed open carry within the city (and did not transform itself into a model of safety by prohibiting concealed carry)."

"The state mistakenly attributes to petitioners the extreme position of insisting on a right to carry anywhere and everywhere... it is not petitioners, but the state that stakes out an extreme position, and it does so out of necessity, for the Sullivan Law is an extreme law."

"The Second Amendment itself confers a right, not a privilege to be extended by states. Thus, the Sullivan Law starts on the wrong (and unconstitutional) foot by beginning with the presumption that New Yorkers may not carry handguns for self-defense."

"The Free Exercise Clause is not reserved for those in especial need of salvation; nor is the right to petition limited to the especially aggrieved. The Second Amendment cannot be limited to those with an unusual need for self-defense."

"But citizen after citizen has been denied a license to carry for self-defense, despite having proffered highly 'particularized' facts, with court after court upholding the denials."

"Our country has never looked kindly on regimes that entrust fundamental constitutional rights to the vast and largely unreviewable discretion of local officials."

"The Sullivan Law and the discretion it grants licensing officials is a product of that unworthy and unconstitutional history."

"The state’s effort to deny the law’s discriminatory roots is yet another failed exercise in revisionist history, as the amicus brief from Italo-Americans Jurists and Attorneys well documents."

"No remand could reconstruct the number of New Yorkers who were deterred from even applying for a license because of their inability to demonstrate that they face a greater need for self-defense than their fellow law-abiding New Yorkers."

"No one would think the state could vest local officers with largely unreviewable authority to decide who really needed to attend Mass, buy books, or confront the witnesses against them... The Second Amendment is no different."

"Under New York law, the time when a handgun may be carried outside the home for self-defense (as opposed to hunting or target-practice) is never, the place is nowhere, and the manner is not at all. That is an evisceration, not a regulation, of the right."

"The same was said of handguns in Heller, yet the Court made clear that the District could not ban them even if doing so would have public safety benefits because the relevant tradeoffs were settled by the Second Amendment."

"The state’s effort to dust off the empirical arguments found unavailing in Heller is just one of many respects in which its position and the Sullivan Law are fundamentally incompatible with Heller."

"But any way the Court approaches the issue, the fate of the Sullivan Law is crystal clear: It cannot be squared with the individual right that pre-dated the Constitution and was guaranteed to the people, no matter their race, religion, or surname, in the Second Amendment."