In a stunningly broad and transformative decision, the Supreme Court has struck down the New York law that says you can only carry a concealed handgun outside your home if you can show you have “proper cause” to do so.
For New Yorkers and residents of six other states including California and Massachusetts, this means concealed carry is now basically an automatic right. Anyone you meet on the street or in the car ahead of you may be lawfully packing.
For gun rights more generally, the opinion is perhaps even more consequential. Decided 6-3 along pure ideological lines, the opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas astonishingly makes Second Amendment rights even more protected than all the other fundamental rights in the constitutional pantheon. It also applies historical analysis so narrowly and bizarrely that it calls into question the very practice.
