The public Cortland Housing Authority (near Syracuse) required its tenants not to possess "firearms … or other weapons as defined by the laws and courts of the State of New York" on its property. In Hunter v. Cortland Housing Authority, decided Jan. 30, 2024 (though I somehow missed it), Judge Glenn Suddaby (N.D.N.Y.) held that this likely violates the Second Amendment,
First, as a threshold matter, the Court has trouble accepting defense counsel's argument that "[p]ublic housing … was assuredly not something that our Founding Fathers could have contemplated at the time of the drafting of the Constitution or the time of the drafting of the Second Amendment, [because] it just did not exist. Publicly-funded housing for low-income families was not … on their radar …. [A]s Justice Thomas said, it's a new circumstance in our modern society." To the contrary, in numerous states, past generations appear to have provided publicly funded housing for low-income families and individuals—albeit likely for less-definite terms of duration than in modern public housing—in the form of places such as publicly supported "almshouses," poor-houses, and poor-farms. Even if such historical analogues could be fairly characterized as "historical twin[s]" or "dead ringers," other relevant similarities would appear to exist to any historical regulation of firearms in boarding houses or the residences of indentured servants.
Granted, the Court does not demand that Defendants show that firearms were traditionally banned in these analogous places. The Court is dutifully mindful of the Second Circuit's criticism of reasoning from "historical silence." For example, lawmakers may not have been moved to forbid the possession of firearms by people who could not afford to own them, or the possession of firearms at locations where the firearms owner resided at the whim of a cautious or peace-keeping property owner. However, one would imagine that a thorough analysis of the Firearms Ban in question would at least start with an acknowledgment that any historical regulations of firearms in the above-referenced almshouses, poor-houses, and poor-farms would be relevantly similar to the Firearms Ban: after all, both the historical and modern regulations would impose a comparable burden (i.e., denying one the ability to defend oneself in one's—potentially congested—publicly funded residence through the use of a firearm), and both the historical and modern regulations would carry a comparable justification (i.e., preventing the unwarranted danger to others in close proximity to oneself due to the non-defensive use of a firearm).
