Case 6:22-cv-06486-JLS Document 56 Filed 12/29/22 Page 27 of 36
after the Second Amendment’s ratification in 1791. These outlier enactments also contrast with colonial-era enactments that, in fact, mandated such carry at places of worship. See generally Benjamin Boyd, Take Your Guns to Church: The Second Amendment and Church Autonomy, 8 Liberty Univ. L. Rev. 653, 699 (2014). The State’s proffered enactments are far too remote, far too anachronistic, and very much outliers—insufficient, then, in the search for an American tradition.[1]
In sum, for the reasons discussed above and in this Court’s Hardaway decision, no proper analogy to sensitive places exists in this case. And the Nation’s history does not countenance such an incursion into the right to keep and bear arms across all houses of worship across the state. The right to self-defense is no less important and no less recognized at these places. The Constitution requires that individuals be permitted to use handguns for the core lawful purpose of self-defense. McDonald, 561 U.S. at 767. And it protects that right outside the home and in public. Bruen, 142 S.Ct. at 2021. As in Bruen, where the Court stated that, “[n]othing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms,” id. at 14, nothing there casts outside of its protection houses of worship. New York’s exclusion violates “the general right to
- ↑ The amicus curiae argues—as it did in Hardaway—that a small number of state laws is sufficient so long as there is not overwhelming evidence of an enduring tradition to the contrary. See Dkt. 51, at 7–9. This turns the test and its burden on their heads. The Bruen Court itself rejected several outliers and was looking for a “broad tradition” of states “meaningfully restrict[ing] public carry.” Bruen, 142 S.Ct. at 2156.
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