Last summer, after losing a gun rights case in front of the Supreme Court, New York leaders passed new restrictions on gun access designed to circumvent the issues that the justices had raised.
The legislation, signed on July 1, made it harder to obtain a concealed carry license, established state oversight for the background check system, and made it a crime to bring a gun into certain “sensitive locations,” including libraries, playgrounds and houses of worship.
“With this action, New York has sent a message to the rest of the country that we will not stand idly by and let the Supreme Court reverse years of sensible gun regulations,” said New York’s Lieutenant Gov. Antonio Delgado at the time.
But like the older gun law that was ultimately blocked by the Supreme Court, the new legislation, called the Concealed Carry Improvement Act, is facing legal challenges.
Last week, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, while most of the policies can remain in place as lawsuits play out, New York cannot keep guns out of church.
More specifically, it said that New York’s blanket ban on concealed carry in houses of worship violates the Constitution by treating churches differently than other privately owned spaces.
“(The law) is not neutral because it allows the owners of many forms of private property, including many types of retail businesses open to the public, to decide for themselves whether to allow firearms on the premises while denying the same autonomy to places of worship,” the Dec. 8 ruling said.
The court added that church leaders have a right to decide for themselves whether guns are allowed.
“It’s hard to see how the law advances the interests of religious organizations, as a whole, by denying them agency to choose for themselves whether to permit firearms,” the ruling said.
In a statement, Jeremy Dys, senior counsel for First Liberty Institute, the firm representing a New York church that’s challenging the law, praised the court’s decision.
“The court made it clear that the U.S. Constitution grants the right of self-defense for all Americans and houses of worship cannot be disarmed. No American should be forced to sacrifice one constitutionally protected freedom to enjoy another,” he said.
The court also took issue with New York’s plan to charge gun owners with a felony if they carried a weapon onto private property that’s open to the public without the owner’s consent and a new part of the concealed carry permit application that asks for the applicant’s social media accounts, Reuters reported.
But the ruling wasn’t all bad news for New York officials. The court vacated part of an injunction put in place by a lower court, making it possible for many aspects of the 2022 gun law to take effect.
“The concealed carry permit requirements upheld in today’s decision include the requirement to demonstrate good moral character and to disclose household and family members on a permit application. In addition, the decision upholds the ban on concealed carry in all sensitive places with the exception of places of worship,” explained a Dec. 8 press release from the New York attorney general’s office.
In upholding those policies, the 2nd Circuit decided that they met the standard laid out in the Supreme Court’s Bruen ruling last year. The ruling said that, in order to satisfy the Second Amendment, new gun laws must be analogous to gun policies put in place in the past, as the Deseret News previously reported.
In the Dec. 8 decision, judges wrote that New York’s effort to make it harder to receive and then use a concealed carry permit is “consistent with the country’s history of regulating firearms in crowded areas and public forums,” according to Reuters.