By Nate Raymond
(Reuters) -A federal appeals court on Wednesday largely upheld a New Jersey law that broadly restricts carrying guns at a variety of “sensitive places” including parks, hospitals, libraries, museums, beaches, zoos and casinos.
A 2-1 panel of the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals held that a lower-court judge wrongly concluded that the law violates the right to keep and bear arms under the U.S. Constitution’s Second Amendment and could not stand after a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling that expanded gun rights.
It marked the latest setback for gun rights advocates, after three other appeals courts upheld similar sensitive-places laws in California, Hawaii and New York. The Supreme Court in April turned away a challenge to New York’s law.
Democratic Governor Phil Murphy signed New Jersey’s measure into law in late 2022 after the 6-3 conservative-majority Supreme Court that June struck down New York’s limits on carrying concealed handguns outside the home.
The decision, New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v Bruen, established a new legal test for firearms restrictions, saying they must be “consistent with this nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” But it also said states could restrict firearms in “sensitive places.”
Several residents and gun rights groups, including the Firearms Policy Coalition and Second Amendment Foundation, sued, arguing the law went too far.
A federal judge in 2023 agreed. But U.S. Circuit Judge Cheryl Ann Krause in Wednesday’s opinion said the law was largely consistent with gun restrictions in the 18th and 19th centuries.
“As we look through our history, a pattern emerges: our Nation has permitted restriction of firearms in discrete locations set aside for particular civic functions and where the presence of firearms was historically regulated as jeopardizing the peace or posing a physical danger to others,” she wrote.
Her opinion was joined by U.S. Circuit Judge Cindy Chung, a fellow appointee of a Democratic president. U.S. Circuit Judge David Porter, an appointee of Republican President Donald Trump, dissented, saying sensitive places “cannot be created by government fiat.”
New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin, a Democrat, welcomed the ruling, saying the law “protects our residents from the threat of firearms in sensitive public places across the state.”
Bill Sack, the Second Amendment Foundation’s director of legal operations, said the court’s approach “would not be tolerated in the context of any other constitutional right.”
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi and Bill Berkrot)
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