A person has to wonder why New York every passed a ban on private citizens purchasing body armor in the first place. The only plausible reason is so they couldn’t protect themselves if confronted by armed agents of the state, who might decide to shoot them for whatever reason.
Now, a federal court has struck down the law, ruling that body armor is an “arm” under the law and, thereby, protected by the Second Amendment. In the lawsuit Heeter v. James, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of New York not only held that body armor is an “arm” protected by the Second Amendment, but also granted the Firearms Policy Coalition summary judgment and permanently enjoined New York’s unconstitutional restrictions on purchasing and selling protective armor.
New York enacted its body armor restrictions in 2022, making it a crime for ordinary residents to purchase protective armor unless they work in a government-approved profession. The law also prohibited businesses from selling body armor to those residents. Violations could result in a Class A misdemeanor for a first offense and a Class E felony for subsequent offenses.
In the recent ruling, U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra Jr. rejected New York’s attempt to deny peaceable people the right to purchase protective equipment intended to stop bullets and save lives. The court also rejected New York’s efforts to characterize body armor as “dangerous and unusual.”
“That Kevlar did not exist at the Founding does not alter the constitutional principles guiding the Court’s analysis,” the ruling stated. “If the Court were to adhere to the State’s analysis, technological advancements in handgun technology would render many today to be unusual and dangerous compared to technology that was available at the Founding. Bruen, however, concluded that, ‘whatever the likelihood that handguns were considered ‘dangerous and unusual’ during the colonial period, they are indisputably in ‘common use’ for self-defense today.’ The same is true of body armor.”
The opinion also recognized substantial evidence of modern civilian ownership and sales, and noted that 49 other states do not impose comparable general body armor bans. As the court explained, New York failed to offer evidence establishing that protective armor was not in common use.
Additionally, New York failed to justify its ban through historical tradition. Rather than identify an American tradition of prohibiting peaceable people from acquiring defensive armor, the State relied on restrictions imposed by English monarchs and medieval laws enacted centuries before the American founding.
The court rejected those arguments, observing that New York could not identify a single post-ratification body armor regulation to support its position. It described the State’s prohibition as a “novel outlier unsupported by any mainstream tradition.”
FPC President Brandon Combs called the ruling “another first-in-history win for FPC and a humiliating defeat for New York’s authoritarian gun control regime.”
“Governor Hochul and Attorney General James actually made it a crime for peaceable people to buy body armor—equipment designed to stop bullets and save lives—and had the tyrannical audacity to call that ‘public safety,’” Combs said in a news release announcing the victory. “Not satisfied with banning guns, they tried to ban the means of surviving criminal gunfire, too. We said from the beginning that this immoral ban was absurd and unconstitutional. Then we backed that up with original historical research, took New York to federal court, and won.”
AG James actually filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit back in November 2024, but at the time Judge Sinatra affirmed plaintiffs’ standing to sue the state over the restrictions.
“Here, plaintiffs have demonstrated an injury in fact…They allege an intention to engage in a course of conduct arguably protected by the Second Amendment but proscribed by New York law,” Sinatra wrote in a 19-page ruling.
