WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court said Monday that it would not weigh in on a major Second Amendment question that has divided the lower courts: May states bar or strictly limit the carrying of guns in public for self-defense?
The justices turned down a case concerning a New York State law that requires people seeking permits for carrying guns in public to demonstrate that they have a special need for self-protection. In urging the justices to hear the case, the National Rifle Association called the law “a de facto ban on carrying a handgun outside the home.”
In November, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, upheld the law. California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts and New Jersey have similar laws.
As is their custom, the justices gave no reasons for declining to hear the case from New York. Additional cases presenting essentially the same question are likely to reach the court in the coming months.
In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns, and it struck down a District of Columbia law that prohibited keeping guns in homes for self-defense.
“We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in the decision, District of Columbia v. Heller. “But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” he added.
Aside from saying that total bans on the right to keep guns at home for self-defense are unconstitutional, the court has said little else about what other laws may violate the Second Amendment. On the other hand, the Heller decision did include a long list of laws and regulations that would be unaffected by the ruling. Among them were “laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools.”
In the lower courts, very few challenges to gun laws and gun prosecutions since the Heller decision have succeeded.
A major exception came in December, just days before the Newtown, Conn., shootings, when a divided three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, in Chicago, struck down an Illinois law that banned carrying guns in public.
Judge Richard A. Posner, writing for the majority, said the ruling was required by the Heller decision. The court gave the Illinois legislature six months to modify the law.
Judge Posner reviewed the empirical literature about the practical consequences for crime and safety of bans on carrying guns in public, and he found it inconclusive. “Anyway,” Judge Posner wrote, “the Supreme Court made clear in Heller that it wasn’t going to make the right to bear arms depend on casualty counts.”
The Illinois decision is in tension with the one from New York, and such conflicts often prompt Supreme Court review. Last month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., upheld the Maryland law.
The case turned down by the Supreme Court on Monday, Kachalsky v. Cacace, No. 12-845, was brought by five New Yorkers who had been denied permits to carry handguns in public. In urging the justices not to hear the case, Eric T. Schneiderman, New York’s attorney general, said the state’s permit requirement was a reasonable regulation that was consistent with the Second Amendment. The Illinois law, by contrast, he said, amounted to a blanket prohibition.
In a statement issued Monday, Mr. Schneiderman said that “New York State has enacted sensible and effective regulations of concealed handguns, and this decision keeps those laws in place.” He added that the court’s order declining to hear the case amounted to “a victory for families across New York who are rightly concerned about the scourge of gun violence that all too often plagues our communities.”
A lawyer for the challengers did not respond to a request for comment.
Attorney General Lisa Madigan of Illinois has said that she will wait to see what the state’s legislature does before deciding whether to ask the Supreme Court to hear the decision striking down the Illinois law.