Can New Yorkers carry guns? A 700 year-old law may inform Supreme Court’s Second Amendment decision
BY Herschel Smith
When the Supreme Court hears oral arguments Wednesday in a closely watched guns case, the discussion won’t start with the last landmark ruling on firearms from 2010, or even with the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791.
Instead, attorneys on both sides will likely reach back to a 700-year-old English law – and a debate over the influence it had on the framing of the Constitution.
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That has drawn both sides of the case, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, into an intense battle over a statute from 1328 that some historians say informed the Framers’ views of when people may carry their guns in public. The Statute of Northampton regulated the carrying of “arms” in public places.
Briefly, I couldn’t care less what English common law says about anything. The colonists fought a war over many things, including gun control (see Kopel, “How the British Gun Control Program Precipitated the American Revolution“).
The colonists fought a war against the government to overthrow tyranny. It’s ridiculous and sophomoric to pretend that they ever assumed that men wouldn’t engage in RKBA, or that they wouldn’t turn those guns against tyranny.
Presuppositions. This is the stuff of life. The 2A makes no sense unless seen in the light of the lives of the men who wrote it and their own assumptions, value judgments and world and life views.
Any lawyer who begins with, discusses or ends with English common law isn’t worth his weight in salt.