Do your Second Amendment rights shrink because your spouse has a concealed carry permit? The New York Attorney General argued a woman couldn’t qualify for a concealed carry license because her husband already had such a license. A New York appeals court in Albany said she could, especially since she had shown a valid self-defense purpose for carrying a gun.
The woman had explained that she needed a gun because she and her husband often carry large amounts of cash for business. But New York officials had replied that she “failed to explain why her stated self-defense needs were not already adequately and independently addressed by her husband’s recent acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry license.”
The New York intermediate appellate court rejected the officials’ argument in its April 27 decision in Matter of DiPerna-Gillen v. Ryba. The primary basis of the court’s ruling was that, in light of the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision, the woman had a Second Amendment right to carry a weapon for self-defense, even without a showing of special need. But the judges also added:
To the extent that the Attorney General attempts, inexplicably, to justify the determination based upon petitioner’s “fail[ure] to explain why her stated self-defense needs were not already adequately and independently addressed by her husband’s recent acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry license,” we note that this was not a basis for the denial of this application and “judicial review of an administrative determination is limited to the grounds invoked by” respondent.
More to the point, the statutory framework contains no such required showing and, suffice it to say that petitioner’s Second Amendment rights are not dependent on her spouse’s acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry pistol permit.
The argument they were responding to was found in the brief submitted by the state attorney general, Letitia James, which said:
Petitioner stated that she was seeking an unrestricted carry license to use for safety purposes when assisting her husband in his hobby of refurbishing woodworking equipment, explaining that picking up products to refurbish and delivering finished products involved traveling “usually out in no-man’s land” and she and her husband “may have several thousand dollars on us ….” … And petitioner further disclosed, but only when asked by respondent, that petitioner’s husband had recently been issued an unrestricted carry license that he could use for these activities….
To [get an unrestricted carry license under the statutory scheme prior to the Supreme Court’s Bruen decision], petitioner was required to show proper cause for the significant expansion she sought for the use of her license. Yet the only evidence she submitted to make that showing was her testimony that she sought to use a firearm for safety purposes while assisting her husband with a hobby that often involved driving to unfamiliar locations with large sums of cash….
Petitioner failed to explain why her stated self-defense needs were not already adequately and independently addressed by her husband’s recent acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry license. As respondent’s questions to petitioner suggested, petitioner’s husband would now be able to bring his firearm when he and petitioner engaged in his hobby together. This fact alone refuted petitioner’s claim that her participation in her husband’s hobby presented “a special need for self-protection distinguishable from that of the general community or of persons engaged in the same profession.”
