One of the questions as the Supreme Court gets ready to issue its decision in the New York gun case is whether the sages will be swayed by the massacres at Uvalde and Buffalo. Nor is it an easy question. One involved, yet again, the slaughter of elementary school pupils cowering in a room with an armed killer. The other involved a racist bent on the murder of African Americans. We have no doubt that the justices, like everyone else, are shaken.

The question before them, though, involves their oath to defend the Constitution, which says the right of the people to keep and bear arms “shall not be infringed.” This case is not about the rights of the killers who struck at Buffalo and Uvalde. No one has any right in America to walk into a schoolroom or supermarket and fire at innocents. This is about enforcing the constitutional rights of Americans who are law-abiding. 

President Biden is trying to jawbone the justices about how no part of the Constitution, including the Second Amendment, is absolute. Even The Great Scalia tried that sophistry. The reason the case the justices are weighing is before the high bench in the first place, though, is that in New York City, a gun license couldn’t be had by, say, Mother Theresa. The state’s strict gun licensing scheme amounts to a de facto handgun ban.

The state requires applicants prove a “special or unique danger to their life,” the New Yorkers who filed the suit point out, and it’s “virtually impossible for the ordinary law-abiding citizen to obtain a license.” At arguments, Justice Samuel Alito said a nurse who worked nights and was scared to get home “by subway” might not qualify for a license. Said he: “Is that consistent with the core right to self-defense, which is protected by the Second Amendment?” 

Chief Justice Roberts, too, was skeptical of New York’s licensing regime to carry a gun. Anyone “looking for a permit to speak on a street corner” faces no need to demonstrate “your speech is particularly important,” he observed. So why is there any need to show why “you’re entitled to exercise your Second Amendment right?” Such comments by the court’s conservative justices raised expectations that New York’s law will be overturned.

Particularly because lower federal courts have allowed to stand laws, like New York’s, “denying ordinary law-abiding citizens their right to carry a handgun for self-defense,” the petitioners in New York lament. “Common sense dictates,” they say, that the right to carry a gun for self-defense “is not confined to the interior of a home,” which is where Heller left it. The court could vouchsafe a right to carry outside the home and across America.

Gun control activists urge the court to hold back. The Brady Campaign warns of a “gun lobby-made nightmare” if the court “adopts the extremist view of the Second Amendment that the gun lobby is pushing.” Michael Bloomberg’s anti-gun Everytown Law says “more people will be shot and killed and our right to public safety will be in even more danger” if the justices “ignore centuries of history supporting New York’s gun safety law.”

Yet it could well be that had more law-abiding citizens been carrying guns at Buffalo and Uvalde, these massacres might have been averted. Gun researcher John Lott also cites statistics showing that individuals granted gun permits are “extremely law-abiding.” His book “Gun Control Myths” notes that for “every 100,000 permit holders, only a couple of them have had their permits revoked for a firearms-related violation.” 

Will the justices quail at broadening gun rights after these atrocities? The justices would do well to take Chief Justice Robert’s advice and turn to the “1924 Canons of Judicial Ethics,” written under Chief Justice Taft’s direction. Canon 14 says judges “should not be swayed by partisan demands, public clamor or considerations of personal popularity or notoriety, nor be apprehensive of unjust criticism.”