NY.- Matthew Seifer, a Long Island firearms safety instructor, is licensed by the state of New York to teach his students where they can legally carry their guns. It is more difficult than it looks.
Last year, the US Supreme Court struck down century-old New York regulations, ruling that citizens had a broad right to carry concealed weapons. The state Legislature, anticipating more firearms, banned firearm access from certain areas, but that new law has already been challenged in court at least 10 times. On March 20, an appeals panel will consider several of the cases at once, extending a dizzying sequence in which judges have thrown out laws, only for higher courts to reinstate them again and again.
Seifer has been forced to change his curriculum each time, and some of those he has taught have taken guns to places where they are prohibited, accidentally violating a law refusing to stay in one place.
“It’s an eye-opening experience for them,” Seifer said. “People have a hard time understanding what they have to do.”
New Yorkers aren’t the only ones who are confused. When the Supreme Court struck down the state’s old law, declaring that Americans did not need to justify their right to bear firearms, it created a new national standard for whether gun laws are constitutional. The ruling threatens to permanently change the regulation even as the United States grapples with gun violence, including more than 80 mass shootings in 2023 alone, as well as other murders and an epidemic of suicides.
In his June opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that law-abiding citizens have the right to “carry firearms in public for self-defense.” He allowed for the possibility of restrictions on that right, but said that any rule would have to be justified with analogies to regulations that were in place in the early history of the United States.
Since then, more than 100 federal court decisions have been handed down as judges across the country try to determine whether new and old laws meet the new standard, according to an article by Jacob Charles, a professor at the University’s law school. from Pepperdine that tracks US gun regulations.
The laws have come under scrutiny in more than 25 states, including Texas, where a federal judge wrote that the Supreme Court had found possession of a firearm by a felon “presumptively constitutional.” A judge in West Virginia found that a state law against carrying guns with “altered, defaced or removed” serial numbers was unconstitutional. And this month, an appeals court hearing cases from Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi struck down a federal law that prohibits defendants with domestic violence restraining orders from carrying firearms.
Meanwhile, the Americans have continued to test the limits of where they can carry their weapons. On Tuesday, the Transportation Security Administration said it had found a record 6,542 firearms at 262 checkpoints at different airports last year, up from 5,972 in 2021 and 4,432 in 2019 ( unloaded firearms are allowed to be transported as checked baggage if they are in closed containers, but the firearms cannot pass through security).
