Illustration by João Fazenda

New York City is a strange and dangerous place, if the plaintiffs in a gun-control case that the Supreme Court has just agreed to hear are to be believed. The suit, which calls the city’s restrictions on transporting handguns through its streets “bizarre,” “irrational,” and “perverse,” was brought by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association—the state affiliate of the National Rifle Association—along with two gun owners who live in the Bronx and one from Staten Island. The case is notable for reasons that go beyond its caricature of the city and its mores. To begin with, this will be the first time the Court seriously considers the Second Amendment since it adopted a radical view of gun rights in District of Columbia v. Heller, in 2008, which overturned a near-ban on handguns in Washington, D.C., and in McDonald v. the City of Chicago, in 2010, which did away with similar restrictions in that city. Those decisions were “transformational,” the plaintiffs argue, but “the news has not yet reached New York City.”

It will also be the first opportunity for the Court’s newest member, Justice Brett Kavanaugh, to begin building what promises to be a disastrous pro-gun legacy. Heller, a 5–4 decision written by Justice Antonin Scalia, upended the way that generations of judges had read the Second Amendment, by recognizing a fundamental, individual right to bear arms, unconnected to a “well-regulated militia.” McDonald then confirmed that Heller could be used to overturn state and local gun laws, as well as federal legislation. Still, both decisions leave room for some basic, long-standing restrictions on guns, such as those that prevent violent felons from buying them. Kavanaugh, though, in the wake of Heller, appears ready to toss out as many restrictions as he can. As an appeals-court judge, he wrote, in a 2011 dissent, that the District of Columbia should not be allowed to ban semi-automatic assault rifles, largely because they were “in common use.” He added that asking people to register their guns is unconstitutional.

The New York case has certain elements in common with Heller: it is a challenge to a municipal regulation which has the potential to loosen laws around the country. The very strictness of the regulation may have made it an appealing target. It is possible, but difficult, to get a license to carry a handgun in New York. An alternative is a “premises” license, which allows an owner to have a handgun in his or her home but also, under a city regulation that has been in force since 2001, requires that owner to keep it at home. With a few narrow exceptions, owners can only take their guns out of the house, unloaded and in a locked case, to go to a shooting range in the city which has certification from the N.Y.P.D. There are seven such ranges, with at least one in each of the five boroughs.

The plaintiffs want to be able to take their guns to second homes or to shooting ranges out of town. They take the view that preventing them from travelling through the streets with their guns actually increases the risk to public safety, in part by forcing them to leave their weapons “in their vacant New York residences,” where anything could happen. One brief suggested that the city might be “underestimating its burglars.” (Crime rates in New York have, in fact, gone down dramatically in recent decades; the number of shootings is the lowest it has been in twenty-five years.) The plaintiffs also claim that being asked to travel without their guns is akin to being forbidden to travel at all—as though a person were not constitutionally whole without a gun. To them, the restriction is as profound a violation of rights as “a prohibition on leaving city limits to get an abortion.”

An overriding issue at stake, then, is whether the Court will decide that the right to “bear” arms is tantamount to a broad right to travel with them. (Justice Clarence Thomas has said, with regard to an earlier case, that he emphatically believes it is.) Gun regulations now vary widely among the states; the strictest of them may eventually be forced to conform to the loosest. A far greater risk to public safety than leaving handguns in empty apartments is the nationwide effort to sanctify the right to carry weapons, concealed or openly, in public places. A majority of states now permit “open carry”—some of them even in bars, stadiums, and day-care centers—and some impose onerous requirements on stores, restaurants, and other businesses that seek to ban guns from their premises. Rates of gun deaths vary, too; they are about six times higher in Alaska and Louisiana—states with very lax gun laws—than they are in New York.

The Justices, in seeking a national standard in the wake of Heller, will, in effect, decide which type of situation is truly “bizarre.” They may do so partly by answering a question that Heller and McDonald left open: What level of “scrutiny” should be applied to gun-control laws in balancing valid government interests, such as public safety, against the individual right recognized by Heller? Kavanaugh, for his part, has written that public safety should not be a determining factor—only “text, history, and tradition” really matter. With that view, he exceeds what had, until recently, been the gun lobby’s wildest hopes.

Meanwhile, the movement to pass stricter gun laws has been gathering strength. A recent Gallup poll found that more than sixty per cent of Americans are in favor of them. There is a growing revulsion at a state of affairs that has made lockdown drills a rite of passage for kindergartners—not least from schoolchildren themselves, who, as the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, in Parkland, Florida, have shown, can be powerful advocates for saner laws. Candidates who support gun control won significant victories in the midterm elections, some of them—such as Representatives Lucy McBath, of Georgia, and Jason Crow, of Colorado—in red and purple states. According to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, forty members of Congress who had been regarded as N.R.A. stalwarts lost their seats.

That political will is set to collide with the ideological priorities of the Court’s conservatives. The larger conflict will play out in the 2020 campaign, as voters decide whether Donald Trump will get to appoint even more judges who share an expansive view of gun rights. In 2011, Kavanaugh wrote that, after Heller, “D.C. seemed not to heed the Supreme Court’s message.” The echo of that language in the plaintiffs’ portrayal of New York is probably not accidental; gun-rights advocates have been waiting for Kavanaugh, or someone like him. Their brief was submitted on the day his confirmation hearings began. ♦