Supreme danger: Guns, the high court and New York City
Tuesday, a man in a ball of rage took out a gun he’d legally purchased in Ohio and fired 33 times at people trapped on an N train. As awfully of-the-moment as the crime feels in a city where violence continues climbing, the brazen use of a weapon on the subway system in such a manner is today quite rare — in no small part because New York, unlike Ohio, is a state where individuals can only obtain a license to carry a concealed handgun in public after demonstrating “proper cause,” meaning a special need for self-defense.
That is today. Some day soon, the U.S. Supreme Court will rule in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association vs. Bruen. It looks highly likely that at least five members of the six-member conservative majority are prepared to assert that states can rarely if ever restrict individuals’ right to carry a concealed weapon in public. Such a radical decision would swiftly deliver a sharp proliferation of weapons in the city’s shared spaces. Anyone who has ever sat on a crowded subway car understands how horrifying the prospect would be.
Justice Sam Alito, a Jerseyite, doesn’t seem to have done much straphanging. In questioning New York Solicitor General Barbara Underwood, he suggested that any and all “people who work late at night in Manhattan” might have a real need to carry a weapon for self-defense on their train trip home.
Further unspooling his fantasy that these countless good guys, and everyone else with any fear, might have a constitutional right to guns to protect themselves from countless bad guys, Alito continued: “There are — there are a lot of armed people on the streets of New York and in the subways late at night right now, aren’t there?” adding, that “all these people with illegal guns, they’re on the subway...but the ordinary, hard-working, law-abiding-people I mentioned, no, they can’t be armed?”
This is “conservative” logic about how to protect lives in crowded public spaces: The potential presence of some thugs and crazies with guns is reason enough to open the floodgates to firearms for all. If the court translates this reckless speculation into constitutional doctrine, God help us.
