Posts Tagged ‘New York’

Brett A. Clark/The Daily Advance

Around the country, courts are confronting a critical question: whether the Second Amendment requires states to issue concealed handgun licenses to virtually anyone who wants one.

This week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit addressed that question, holding that New York’s requirement that concealed carry applicants show “a special need for self-protection” does not violate the Second Amendment.  In Kachalsky v. Cacace, the court explained that the requirement of a showing of need is substantially related to the government’s important interests in preventing crime and guaranteeing public safety.  The court found that the requirement is consistent with gun regulation that has existed since the nation’s founding, noting, “[t]here is a longstanding tradition of states regulating firearm possession and use in public because of the dangers posed to public safety.”  New York has required a showing of need for carrying a concealed weapon for 100 years.

While many states issue a concealed handgun license to virtually anyone who applies, states like California and New York require an applicant to show a legitimate need to carry a gun in public, usually by presenting documentation of a real threat to the applicant’s safety.  Those requirements are now under attack in a number of Second Amendment lawsuits nationwide brought by individuals who have no legitimate need to carry guns in public places.

Thankfully, the courts are standing up for the safety of their citizens and protecting the laws that work to reduce the violence that plagues their communities. For more this trend, read our publication, The Second Amendment Battleground: Victories in the Courts and Why They Matter.

To find out more about this case, read the decision in Kachalsky v. Cacace.

Want more? Check out the other recent success stories.

The New York State Bar Association devoted the summer 2012 issue of its Government, Law and Policy Journal to an in-depth discussion of gun laws, public health, and public safety, and invited the Law Center, as well as other gun violence prevention organizations, public health experts, elected officials, and scholars, to contribute to the conversation. We are pleased to share our contribution, which analyzes the current laws on the books in New York.

Our article, entitled “Regulating Guns in New York: Existing State Laws and How They Could Be Strengthened,” focuses on six key legislative approaches to preventing gun violence that New York should adopt. For each approach, the article details New York’s existing law, or lack thereof, recommends how the law should be changed, and presents examples of relevant existing laws in other states and New York City.

Recent polling confirms that a strong majority of New Yorkers support limiting the number of handguns an individual can buy to one a month and strengthening the state’s laws regulating firearm sales, two of the critical issues that we discuss in our article.

This article is reprinted with permission from Government, Law and Policy Journal, Summer 2012, Vol. 14, No. 1, published by the New York State Bar Association, One Elk Street, Albany, NY 12207.