Dave Kopel has an excellent article in the New York Sun. Interesting factoid I didn’t know:
As a Monroe County court accurately observed in the 1994 case Citizens for a Safer Community v. City of Rochester, “The Courts of this State have concluded that the language of federal law interpreting the Second Amendment (which is identical in its language to Article 2, section 4 of the Civil Rights Law) should be used in interpreting the provisions of this state law.”
Some New York courts have interpreted the New York right to arms restrictively, but these decisions were explicitly based on misunderstanding of the same language in the Second Amendment. The cases treating the Civil Rights Law as almost meaningless are of dubious validity now that Heller has made is clear that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” is a broad and important individual right.
So basically, the ruling in Heller reinterprets, under New York State case law, the meaning of their state right to keep and bear arms provision. That doesn’t speak well for the future of the Sullivan Act.
Yay! I’m a New York resident and I vote!