John Donohue, a Stanford law professor who has studied firearms cases, said that by focusing on New York’s requirement to show “good cause” to be armed in public, the Supreme Court did not have to decide that “you no longer need to have good moral character to carry a gun.”

“I think that is why the California judges in the current case were saying that even if the ‘good cause’ requirement is no longer valid, we can still have a ‘good moral character’ requirement, unless the Supreme Court explicitly says otherwise,” Donohue said.