Guns in public spaces, yes. Guns in public parks, no.

New York enacted a comprehensive gun control law in 2022, the same year the Supreme Court issued the Bruen ruling that made it much more difficult for the states to regulate guns, holding that any current gun regulations must have a historical analogue that was in place when the Bill of Rights was enacted in 1791, or when the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted in 1868. The '"historical analogue" framework requires judges to become historians as they try to determine what the gun laws looked like two centuries ago before comparing them to modern statutes. The entire process is uncertain, and some cases both uphold and strike down today's gun laws. This case is one of them.

The case is Christian v. James, issued on May 18. We have two challenges here. First, the plaintiffs, which include gun rights organizations, argue that a New York law prohibiting you from bringing a gun onto private property unless the property owner posts a conspicuous sign stating that guns are allowed. We call this the Private Property Provision. 

The plaintiffs argue that the Private Property Provision violates the Second Amendment as it applies to private property that is open to the public, like a gas station or grocery store. To win the case, the state has to show that a historical tradition supports this statute. But while the state presents a series of old laws from around the country that appear to prohibit weapons on private property without permission, the Court of Appeals holds these old laws are not sufficiently comparable to the New York law because the old laws were enacted for a different reason than the reasons motivating the modern New York law, that is, the old laws were in place to prohibit unauthorized hunting or drew from racial stereotypes. But barring unauthorized hunting and racial stereotyping is not what motivated New York to enact the gun control law in 2022. Rather, New York enacted the gun control law in 2022 to prevent school shootings and other gun disasters. A worthy goal, but there does not appear to be a historical analogue for such laws. This provision New York's gun law is therefore unconstitutional, as it does not overcome a principle goal of the Second Amendment: the right to self defense.

The other provision under challenge relates to public parks, a "sensitive location" under the gun control law where guns are disallowed. The state defends this provision by identifying more than 100 historical laws that are relevantly similar. The research in support of this argument, by the way, is impressive: the state finds laws from small to mid-size U.S. cities from the late 1800's and early 1900's. Where are they finding these old statutes? The research was time well-spent, as the Second Circuit (Bianco and Lee,  over Judge Menashi's dissent) finds these old laws proves a tradition of regulating firearms in crowded public forums.