Leah Litman: The guns case is about much more than guns

Begin with Rifle & Pistol. Some New Yorkers have “premises” pistol licenses—meaning that they can have a gun in their home for self-protection but can’t carry it outside their home. Until recently, city law allowed only one narrow exception—gun owners could take their guns, locked away and unloaded, to any of the city’s seven licensed pistol ranges to receive training and practice their skills.

The plaintiffs in the case wanted to take their pistols to out-of-town gun ranges or out-of-town shooting competitions. One plaintiff owned a second home upstate and wanted to take his gun there for protection.

Gun-rights advocates have been very frustrated with John Roberts’s Court. A decade ago, the Court decided twin cases establishing an individual Second Amendment right to handgun possession in the home. After that, the Court has steadfastly refused to elaborate, and the lower courts have almost uniformly refused to extend the Second Amendment to other contexts such as openly carrying weapons in public, carrying weapons licensed in one state to other states where they aren’t licensed, or possessing semiautomatic weapons..

Then, in October 2018, Donald Trump’s administration muscled Brett Kavanaugh onto the Court in place of Anthony Kennedy. Three months later, the Court granted review of the New York ordinance. In light of the extreme views Kavanaugh expressed as a lower-court judge, it seemed possible that the Court would announce new restrictions on local and state gun laws.

New York City, and New York State, understandably reacted with alarm. The City hastily repealed the ordinance; the state legislature passed a statute that provided the City could never again pass a similar law.

You asked for it, the City then told the plaintiffs, you got it. This parrot has ceased to be.

Not so fast, said the plaintiffs. What if the City used previous violations of the old law to refuse licenses under the new one? Beyond that, the new law required license holders going out of town to make “continuous and uninterrupted transport” of their guns once placed in a car. This, the plaintiffs claimed, forbade “a stop at a gas station or coffee shop en route.” The new law also, they argued, “require[s] written permission before a handgun can be taken to a gunsmith, and preclude[s] transport to a summer rental house.”

These injuries seem to have been mostly made up after the fact. Richard P. Dearing of the city’s Law Department told the justices that the “no coffee” rule wasn’t in the regulations—the plaintiffs invented it—and that previous noncompliance had not ever been and would not ever be used against license holders. No state court has interpreted the meaning of continuous and uninterrupted yet, and for the Supreme Court to step in to construe a city ordinance would be quite unusual.