Over at Bearing Arms Tom Knighton has an article explaining that The New Republic Laments Bruen's Actually Protecting Rights. In this case, the defendant wasn't what they call a "sympathetic" person. Indeed, it was an actual felon. But even a felon has rights too. Indeed, in NYC today they may have more rights than you do.
If something is a right, then you have a right to do it without being harassed by the authorities. I can criticize the government, for example, and shouldn't have to worry about the government making my life difficult because I did. I shouldn't get accosted by the police simply because I'm going to a church the powers-that-be don't particularly care for.
But for a very long time, if you carried a gun, you could be approached by law enforcement under a presumption that you were doing something wrong until you showed them you were, in fact, legal.
So, in places like New York one would be presumed guilty until proven innocent if you were carrying a gun. Thus, they turned American jurisprudence on its head.
Folks at The New Republic have an issue with that.
With a headline reading, "How the Supreme Court Created One Nation Under the Gun," and a sub-headline that reads, "Two years after the high court's ruling in Bruen, we now live in a world with a constitutional expectation that any firearm is a legal firearm," they make it clear they see it as a bad thing.
It’s been more than two years since the Supreme Court opened a new frontier for gun laws. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court laid out a far more restrictive test for determining whether such laws violate the individual right to bear arms that the justices previously found in the Second Amendment. I’ve chronicled time and time again how judges have tried to apply that test to existing laws, sometimes with far-reaching implications.
Earlier this month, a federal judge in New York ruled that simply possessing a gun in public no longer amounts to probable cause for an arrest in that state. The decision is one of the first to apply Bruen to how police officers carry out searches and arrests—a sign of how much the Supreme Court’s ruling has changed the legal landscape when it comes to guns in American life.
In February of 2023, NYPD officers encountered Robert Homer on Guy R. Brewer Boulevard, near the border of Queens’ Rochdale neighborhood. A group of officers, using the city’s ARGUS surveillance camera network, observed him sitting in the driver’s seat of a silver van. One of the officers saw Homer put what appeared to be a black handgun into one of his pockets while in the van, go to a nearby deli to get something to eat, and return to the van. After his return, officers arrested him and found a handgun in his pocket. Court documents do not say whether he was able to eat his meal first.
After his arrest, federal prosecutors charged Homer with violating a federal law that bans people with felony convictions from owning firearms. Critically, however, the officers were unaware that Homer had a previous felony conviction prior to arresting him. Instead, their justification for making the arrest—what is known as “probable cause” in court—revolved around his simple possession of a firearm. The arresting officer additionally told the court that he thought Homer lacked proper “firearm discipline” and that he was in what the police described as a “high-crime area.”
The emphasis above is mine. The police would have been fully justified in arresting Homer on the charge of being a felon in possession of a gun*. But they were not aware of the status of Homer as a felon, but merely that he had a gun. I remember years ago at a rest stop here in North Carolina that a man came out of the rest area with an openly carried gun on his hip. One of the other men got very upset, and was only less so when I explained that it was perfectly legal to do so.
If we see a group of people protesting, the assumption is that they're lawfully exercising their First Amendment rights until or unless we're shown otherwise. Gun rights are no different.
Exactly so.
* At one time, a person's right to carry a gun was restored with completion of his sentence for a felony. Wardens of prisons returned the inmate's belongings including guns and ammunition at the end of the inmate's sentence. David Codrea coined the notion that if a person can not be trusted with a gun, he can not be trusted without a custodian. So, by letting someone out of prison, society had determined that they could be trusted, rightly or wrongly. The idea that committing a felony disbars someone from enjoyment of Constitutionally protected rights seems, in my humble opinion to go againsts the jurisprudence layed out by the Constitution and common law. But I am not a lawyer.
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