camo556
Ultimate Member
- Aug 29, 2021
- 2,634
I am curious about what others think about these historical prohibitions.
Doubtful. You seem denser than the tungsten in my buffer tube.
Nothing in this thread has been said about open vs concealed that has not already been said eleventy trillion times over. Heller already defined the problem away,
Halbrook has already written extensively about concealed weapons laws. Concealed carry was banned in the South for moral reasons, not in the north. Also we have the case Heller favorably cited Bliss v. Commonwealth, where prohibition on concealed carry was deemed unconstitutional under the Kentucky constitution. The Kentucky constitution at the time stated "that the right of the citizens to bear arms in defence of themselves and the state, shall not be questioned."
Halbrook :
Looking at the history and tradition in the United States, in the nineteenth century, actually, the Southern states, by and large, enacted concealed weapon laws, which implied that there was no going-armed prohibition, because you would not need to ban concealed weapons if it was already illegal. However, the Northern states did not. The Massachusetts law from 1836 did not provide that it was a crime to be armed in public. It said that if you are armed, if someone is feeling threatened, that person can bring a petition, and if that person can reasonably show that he or she is threatened by you or that you are threatening a breach of the peace, that person can basically get a peace bond where you have to get sureties to guarantee your good behavior. That was not a ban at all, as it required actually threatening people. And everybody could agree with that. That is fully consistent with a constitutional right to bear arms—that if you bear arms and you threaten other people, or if you are likely to commit a breach of the peace, we do not want people like that going around, being armed, engaging in that kind of disruptive behavior.
So there were basically no carry restrictions in the Northern states as long as it was peaceable. And, in fact, in New Jersey, which today has some of the most stringent restrictions on the bearing of arms, open carry was legal until 1966, which sounds incredible.
And an interesting note about the Statute of Northampton:
What the Statute of Northampton did was to prohibit riding or going armed. And it also had language about doing so to the terror of the King’s subjects. And the way the English courts ended up construing that statute was it was an offense to go armed only if you did so in a manner that terrified other people So if you were carrying concealed, obviously, you
wouldn’t be doing that. Or if you were simply peacefully going
about your business, you wouldn’t be doing that.
https://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/21/2020/03/Halbrook-FINAL.pdf
But none of that is relevant, because Heller already defined "bear arms"
At the time of the founding, as now, to “bear” meant to“carry.” See Johnson 161; Webster; T. Sheridan, A Complete Dictionary of the English Language (1796); 2 Oxford English Dictionary 20 (2d ed. 1989) (hereinafter Oxford) .When used with “arms,” however, the term has a meaning that refers to carrying for a particular purpose—confrontation. In Muscarello v. United States, 524 U. S. 125 (1998), in the course of analyzing the meaning of “carries a firearm” in a federal criminal statute, JUSTICE GINSBURG wrote that “urely a most familiar meaning is,as the Constitution’s Second Amendment . . . indicate: ‘wear, bear, or carry . . . upon the person or in the clothing or in a pocket, for the purpose . . . of being armed and ready for offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another person.’”
In the clothing or pocket. Says so right there.
I only want to add that NY has stopped arguing about carry. They framed the question as what restrictions they can put on the right to carry. Game over. They have moved on. So should you. If you think that NYC's fall back is open carry in NYC I have a Glock 7 to sell you. Their fall back is that all of NYC is a sensitive area.