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The Supreme Court on Monday is set to hear arguments in what may be the most significant gun case to grace the high court in over a decade. Depending on how the case proceeds, a unified conservative majority may elect to advance gun rights far beyond the reaches of current law. The question at hand—whether and how far the right to bear arms extends outside one's home and into the public square—could lay the groundwork for the most consequential Second Amendment ruling since the 2008 Heller decision. Then-Justice Antonin Scalia authored the court's groundbreaking opinion in that case, rooting an individual's right to bear arms for homebound self-defense and defense of one's family in the Second Amendment for the first time. Monday's oral arguments are a culmination of years of litigation made possible by a framework established by Scalia in 2008, which carved out constitutional protections for firearms uses that abide "traditionally lawful purposes." Over the ensuing years, a frenzy of legal spelunkers sought to explore just how cavernous the scope of Heller's protection was. In 2013, New York City's gun laws served as a springboard for one such piece of litigation; that case, now presented to the justices, will determine whether the court is ready to lurch gun rights forward once more. The New York State Rifle and Pistol Association, along with Romolo Colantone, Efrain Alvarez and Jose Anthony Irizarry—three New York City residents—had filed suit against the city to challenge its licensing scheme, one of the most restrictive in the country. New York City requires would-be gun owners to obtain what's known as a premises license in order to lawfully possess firearms at home. Until recently, guns purchased through a premises license could only be removed from the home, unloaded and in a locked case, in order to be transported for target practice to an approved shooting range. Other specified reasons for transportation had to receive preclearance from the city. New York City has only seven public authorized ranges, and gun owners could not transport their weapons to a second home or range outside city boundaries."While this case is about an unusual and limited local rule, it provides an opportunity for the Supreme Court to reaffirm that the Second Amendment leaves ample room for the kinds of reasonable gun safety laws that save lives and that Americans overwhelmingly support," Eric Tirschwell, litigation director of the gun-control group Everytown for Gun Safety, said in a press release in January. After New York Democrats last November seized all three political arms of government for the first time in a decade, the state party apparatus promised to deliver a boldly progressive agenda: passing speedy trial reform, a sweeping climate plan and new sexual harassment protections, among other bills. Yet one measure stood out among the unusually productive legislative session: a law affirming the privileges of gun owners in the state. Not to be outdone, New York City enacted its own rules in July expanding Second Amendment rights. The Supreme Court had just months earlier decided to hear the pistol association's appeal, and the city and state were working overtime to make the case disappear. The logic went as follows: if New York could abolish restrictions that formed the basis for the plaintiffs' objections, then there would be no further controversy for the court to rule on. New York State residents are now generally permitted under the new rules to bring their firearms from any place where they have a license to any other place within the state where they are licensed to possess. New York City residents can transport their firearms to second homes or gun ranges outside city limits, as long as they have satisfied the licensing requirements of their destination's regulators. Before the changes, early signs on the merits of New York's old gun laws (while they were still in effect) had appeared promising. In 2015, a U. S. district court judge ruled against the plaintiffs. A similar fate befell the case in 2018 after an appellate court ruled in the city's favor. New York was, until recently, somewhat confident in its position, having gamely survived these legal hurdles and scrutiny the judiciary had thus far been applying to its reasoning. But everything changed when the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case. Even when Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016, was realizing the long-constrained dreams of the national conservative movement, gun control still had a substantial and fighting chance. Scalia's opinion enumerated a host of lawful restrictions on gun ownership, suggesting that the regime of gun control would not come crumbling down with his scholarship. In fact, the main sort of gun ownership the Heller opinion protected was a right to defend one
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