An appeal to the Supreme Court justices.
By Laura Reston Senior Staff Editor, Opinion |
There are few issues more partisan than gun control in America. As a former judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, J. Michael Luttig is used to siding with conservatives on questions around firearms. He knows many of the conservative justices on the Supreme Court well, and was once rumored to be a contender for the high court himself. |
So when some lawyers and former government officials asked him to help file an amicus brief defending a tough New York gun permit law, which forces residents to demonstrate "proper cause" if they want a license to carry a concealed weapon in public, he thought himself an odd choice, thinking that he would find it unconstitutional. |
But as he dug into legal briefs in this particular case, probing their foundations, he was surprised to find strong and compelling evidence that the New York law was not only constitutional, but also rooted deep in American history and tradition. |
Judges, whether current or former, rarely try to influence the decisions their colleagues make on the bench, but today, we are publishing an article that does just that. In a sharply reasoned and unsparingly argued essay, Luttig and Richard D. Bernstein, an appellate lawyer who clerked for Antonin Scalia, appeal to the conservative justices on the Supreme Court, asking them to uphold the New York law. Tomorrow, the Court will begin oral arguments in the case. |
Since medieval England, they explain, legislatures have banned guns in fairs, markets or indeed wherever a person would "go armed." Even Amy Coney Barrett has acknowledged that these early laws are "the best historical support for a legislative power" to restrict firearms. |
Striking down the New York law would upend a regulatory scheme for the public carry of guns that has been meticulously designed over the course of the past two centuries, laying waste to legislative efforts to curb gun violence in America, Luttig and Bernstein write. If the justices are true to their conservative principles, they will "leave these decisions for the people and their elected representatives to make — as the framers of our Constitution intended." |
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