Dr. Angus McClellan has just posted 151 pages of "Additional Research on Comprehensive Security and Sensitive Places" showing that at the Founding armed security was tied to each of Bruen's three sensitive places where arms could be restricted. Historical tradition from the American colonies and early states demonstrates that the predicate for banning weapons by the public at courts, legislative assemblies, and polling places was the government's provision of real protection in fact. That research supplements Dr. McClellan's compendium "The Second Amendment, Sensitive Places, and Comprehensive Government Security" which I summarized here.
In Wolford, the Supreme Court found Hawaii's law banning firearms on private property open to the public without affirmative consent of the owner – aka, the "Vampire Rule" – to violate the Second Amendment. The Court took notice of, but did not resolve, the issue that, "On a large portion of the land within the State's boundaries, possession of a firearm is now flatly prohibited." That issue has been pending in the several states that sought to nullify Bruen's holding that firearm carry permits may not be restricted to a privileged few or denied for purported lack of "need." One of those states is New Jersey, and early this year the Third Circuit en banc held oral argument about that ban in Koons v. Attorney General. See my post here.
The premise of these bans is that any place is "sensitive" if the legislature so declares. While it is often argued that being crowded suffices, that is belied by the fact that the bans include vast acreage of wooded parklands inhabited primarily by deer and squirrels. But Bruen explicitly rejected an arms prohibition based on being crowded, explicitly mentioning Manhattan as an example. Bruen did not go into the factual historical tradition justifying gun bans in the three locations it mentioned, as the issue was not before the Court. And that's where the research by Dr. McClellan fills the gap.
