A Right Delayed...

Thirty-five years ago, the state of Florida passed a law that assured any applicant for a Carry Concealed Weapon (CCW) permit be issued said permit unless the State could offer a legitimate reason to deny it. This is called the "shall-issue" doctrine.

Florida was not the first to embrace this doctrine, but it was the most noted. There was much gnashing of teeth and many predictions of armageddon from those who don't care for the Second Amendment's protections and who feel that their opinions supersede others' rights. None of those doomsday predictions came true, and indeed crime decreased thereafter.

Across these past four years, the shall-issue doctrine expanded across most of the nation. It was followed up by an even more faithful recognition of Second Amendment protections: the Constitutional Carry movement. This doctrine eliminates the permitting requirement entirely for CCW (disqualified individuals, such as convicted felons and those with protection orders against them, are still debarred from possessing or carrying). By the numbers, shall-issue is now the law in 21 states and Constitutional Carry in another 21. Those 42 states comprise 75% of the nation's populace, meaning that the decision to carry a concealed weapon cannot be arbitrarily denied by the government for the large majority of Americans.

The Supreme Court just expanded that widespread reality to all Americans, in its recent ruling in NYSRPA v Bruen.

The press, even some presumptively conservative pages, are referring to this case as the biggest expansion in 2A rights since the landmark Heller case in 2008. Those who properly understand "rights" know that "expansion" is the wrong word here. It should be "restoration," as in "the Court finally recognized that 2A protects an individual right, just as the rest of the Bill of Rights does.

That it took fourteen years for the Court to get to this point has been a frustration for many, including Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote the Bruen decision, and who got increasingly vocal with each denial of certiorari for gun rights cases across that time span. That Bruen was released on his birthday is a happy coincidence (or perhaps not so coincidental).

The Bruen case focused on New York State law that required an applicant for a CCW showed "proper cause" and had "special need." In practice, this meant that an average citizen's self-defense justification was not only rejected, it was (literally, at times) laughed out of the licensing office. Thomas properly called this anti-liberty premise out:

We know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need.

Our left-leaning leaders and pundits, who don't care for the rights of the unwashed masses they wish to lord over, are predictably unamused by this Court ruling. Biden (and NY Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, among others) said the ruling "contradicts common sense." Watch as "common sense," a phrase the Left has long used in pushing its gun control agenda (read more about that here), is repeated across the mainstream press, the political left, and social media.

That'll all be mostly impotent wasp-chewing. The ruling is here, the Democrats are about to lose Congress to the Republicans, and no one's paying attention to Joe's whining any more.

The relevant question, to residents of NY and the other may-issue states, is when we'll be able to get the CCWs we've been denied. I find it extremely unlikely that NY will adopt a Utah-style permitting process, where by statute any applicant must be issued a permit within 60 days. I also find it unlikely that NY will enter the reciprocity world, where certain states' CCWs will be deemed acceptable here.

Instead, I expect we will see new permitting rules that will bottleneck CCW permitting, and additional bureaucratic foot-dragging (we've got SO many applications it'll take us two years to get to yours). Locally, a non-carry pistol permit can take a year to acquire, and I expect very little effort to improve that process. Which will translate to lawsuits, and court cases, and more time elapsing. Eventually, this will all shake out, and the sufficiently motivated will get their CCWs, but I'd be surprised if someone who started a pursuit tomorrow got a permit before 2024 rang in.

It took far too long for the Court to affirm what any plain reading of the Second Amendment and the concomitant history tell us: that it protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. It took a couple years past Heller to assert that this right applies to the states and not just to the District of Columbia (where Heller resided). It's taken a dozen years to tell the few states that don't like our individual right that they can't arbitrarily deny it.

It'll take a couple more, I predict, for those states to finally comply with the ruling's intent and spirit.

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Yours in liberty,

Peter.