New York lawmakers will meet in an emergency session on Thursday to change the state's gun-licensing laws to conform with a landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision that allowed people to carry weapons in public for self-defense.
The Supreme Court decision last week was in a case challenging New York's century-old gun license laws. The six justices in the court's conservative majority ruled that it was unconstitutional to require law-abiding people to provide proper cause, or some kind of special need, for concealed-carry handgun licenses for self-defense.
The efforts of New York lawmakers to keep as many gun regulations as possible while obeying the Supreme Court will be closely watched, including by pro-gun groups such as the National Rifle Association. The Supreme Court ruling made it easier to challenge and overturn laws governing weapons.
New York's Democrat-controlled legislature, which broke for summer recess, is about to codify what the Supreme Court called sensitive places where the public can be barred from carrying weapons.
The court said it would likely accept courthouses, schools and government buildings as sensitive places, but would not accept broad application of the label. The ruling warned lawmakers that they could not do anything that would make the entire island of Manhattan a sensitive place.
In the ruling in New York State Rifle Pistol Association v. Bruen, the court said gun regimes in California, New Jersey, Hawaii, Massachusetts, Maryland and Washington D.C. are also unconstitutional.
The court ruled that people with certain criminal history or mental illness could still be denied the right to carry weapons, despite the fact that the revised laws must more closely resemble the gun laws of the 43 states identified by the court.
New Yorkers will likely take cues from the language, as well as from the test set out in the ruling that makes a weapons regulation constitutional only if it is similar to limitations on arms found in American history, particularly in the 18th century, when the Constitution's Second Amendment was ratified.
New York's current gun license rules were codified in 1913.