The Justice Department requested Wednesday that the Supreme Court overturn a New York City gun law regulating where licensed gun owners can take their firearms.
The Second Amendment case will be heard by the justices next term, the first such case the court has heard since Justice Antonin Scalia’s landmark opinion in 2008 that a person has a constitutionally guaranteed right to keep a gun at home and a follow-up case two years later.
The Supreme Court has since then declined to take up other gun rights cases, frustrating Second Amendment supporters.
Gun-rights proponents believe that this change of course may be a result of Justice Brett Cavanaugh’s last year confirmations, solidifying a conservative majority in the country’s highest court.
“New York City’s transport ban infringes the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the 2nd and 14th Amendments,” Solicitor General Noel Francisco argued in a friend of the court brief Wednesday.
He further urged the court to confirm that an individual’s right to “take his firearms outside his home and to transport it to other places — such as a second home or a firing range — where he may lawfully possess that firearm” is protected by the Second Amendment.
What is at issue is a portion of the law that prohibits gun-owning citizens from taking their firearms to a location other than the registered address, with the exception of cases where the gun owner travels to an authorized small arms range or a shooting club.
The challenge was filed by the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, which argued through a lawyer that a law-abiding resident of New York cannot take his gun to his “second home for the core constitutional purpose of self-defense or to an upstate county to participate in a shooting competition, or even across the bridge to a neighboring city for target practice.”
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