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The Supreme Court’s Gun Decision Will Lead To More Violent Crime

John J. Donohue III

(Originally published by The Washington Post on July 8, 2022) 

In one of its major decisions this term, the Supreme Court struck down a 109-year-old New York law that said that only people who could demonstrate a compelling need to carry a gun could do so. Simply living in a dangerous neighborhood and wanting to protect oneself from crime wasn’t good enough, New York said — a judgment the court deemed unconstitutional, as it announced “an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

Whatever one’s view of the best way to interpret the Second Amendment, we unfortunately know what effects this ruling will have in the relatively few states that still restrict the carrying of weapons (such as New York, California, New Jersey and Massachusetts).

(Continue reading the opinion essay on The Washington Post’s page here.)

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