On one side is the American Civil Liberties Union and its New York state counterpart, which contend that the state law is justified to protect First Amendment rights in the public sphere. On the other side are a coalition of New York–based public defender groups who contend that the law actually gives cops a license to discriminate and harm indigent and minority New Yorkers who try to exercise their Second Amendment rights. The result is two starkly different visions of how the law affects civil rights, public safety, and the Constitution. …
The ACLU’s official position on the Second Amendment is that it protects a collective right to self-defense and not an individual one, a stance it admits is at odds with current constitutional law. “For seven decades, the Supreme Court’s 1939 decision in United States v. Miller was widely understood to have endorsed that view,” the group stated in an explainer on its website. “This position is currently under review and is being updated by the ACLU National Board in light of the U.S. Supreme Court decision in D.C. v. Heller in 2008.” A review of that page’s history on the Internet Archive shows that it has not been updated since at least 2016, if not longer. …
Siding with gun rights groups in a friend-of-the-court brief is a coalition of New York–based public defender groups: Black Attorneys of Legal Aid, the Bronx Defenders, Brooklyn Defender Services, and seven county public defense offices. “For our clients, New York’s licensing regime renders the Second Amendment a legal fiction,” they told the court. “Worse, virtually all our clients whom New York prosecutes for exercising their Second Amendment right are Black or Hispanic. And that is no accident. New York enacted its firearm licensing requirements to criminalize gun ownership by racial and ethnic minorities. That remains the effect of its enforcement by police and prosecutors today.”
— Matt Ford in The Supreme Court’s Next Big Gun Rights Case Has Allies Trading Fire