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How Supreme Court Gun Ruling Has Changed Policing Practices

Crime and Justice News

Two and a half years ago, the Supreme Court handed down a decision that experts said would upend the nation's gun laws. New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen centered on how New York issued permits to people who wanted to carry their guns in public. The court said that the state’s practice of issuing concealed carry permits only to those who could prove they had a special need to carry a gun — like a threat to their personal safety — was a violation of their constitutional rights. The ruling invalidated not only New York’s laws but also the regulations in California, New Jersey, Maryland, and other states that are home to more than 80 million people. .Since Bruen, there have been more than 1,000 court cases in which people convicted of felonies have contested bans on gun ownership. Less discussed has been what the change has meant for policing and for criminal justice. The worst-case scenario experts warned about, rising gun violence because more people were carrying weapons, hasn’t materialized. Still, Bruen has presented new challenges to how the police operate and new opportunities for people they’ve charged with crimes, Vox reports.


When the Bruen decision came down, LeRonne Armstrong felt like his job was about to get a lot more difficult.

Armstrong was police chief in Oakland, Calif, Oakland was suffering from an epidemic of gun violence that got worse during the pandemic. Armstrong didn’t think that having more guns on the street would help solve the city’s problems, and state law allowed police to deny people concealed carry permits if they couldn’t demonstrate a reason for one. After Bruen, law enforcement in California could no longer deny concealed carry permits at their own discretion. Oakland, Armstrong said, saw “a huge spike in requests for concealed weapons permits.” Similarly, applications to carry a gun skyrocketed in New York City, Baltimore and Washington, D.C., matching trends in other big cities like Chicago and Philadelphia. Some police departments, facing staffing shortages and the pandemic gun violence surge, were overwhelmed with the number of applications and couldn’t keep up, so much so that they were sued for failing to process them quickly enough. “Bruen should be used as a tool for decriminalization of minority gun ownership,” writes William Jacobs-Perez in the University of Maryland Law Journal of Race, Religion, Gender and Class. The fact that Bruen makes it harder for police to justify practices like stop-and-frisk, he says, provides an opportunity to abandon the system of punishing people for gun possession “in favor of policies that tackle the root causes of gun violence.”


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