2A Victory! District Court Strikes Down New York State’s Body Armor Ban

BUFFALO, N.Y. — On Wednesday, October 21, a United States District Court ruled that New York State’s ban on defensive body armor “violates the Second Amendment,” in a case challenging a first-of-its-kind law. 

Judge John L. Sinatra Jr.’s 47-page decision, written for the United States District Court for the Western District of New York, enjoins enforcement of the New York statute passed in 2022, which prohibits the purchase and sale of body armor to residents of New York who are not engaged or employed in an eligible profession, and makes it up to a Class E felony to take possession of such body armor. (As with all gun control measures, it exempts law enforcement and military personnel.)

The Firearms Policy Coalition-backed Heeter v. James complaint was filed on July 1, 2024, to challenge the measure, naming Attorney General Letitia James and three other government officials as defendants “for enforcing state laws infringing the right of law-abiding, peaceable citizens to purchase body armor for defense of self and family and for other lawful purposes.”

Judge Sinatra, who measured the case against the Supreme Court’s Bruen test, agreed with the plaintiffs, writing, “body armor is an ‘Arm’ protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment. As such, regulation in this area is permissible only if the State demonstrates that the new enactment is consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations. New York fails that test.”

“This is another first-in-history win for FPC and a humiliating defeat for New York’s authoritarian gun control regime,” said FPC President Brandon Combs, in a press statement. “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.’ 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.”

Judge Sinatra did grant the state’s request for a 14-day stay pending appeal, meaning there is a two-week delay before his order stopping the state from enforcing the challenged ban goes into effect.

Among its many fantastic assertions supporting the ban, the state argued that body armor is “uniquely designed to create mayhem,” a proposition for which, Judge Sinatra said, “the State failed to set forth any evidence” in its support.

Not only did the state argue that “body armor is not an ‘Arm’ as the term would have been commonly understood in 1791 or 1868,” it went on to suggest that, “at most, body armor is better understood as a tactical accessory to firearms” and not subject to protection by the Second Amendment.

Judge Sinatra dispensed with that concept, observing that even defensive arms are protected by the United States Constitution:

The Constitution requires that individuals be permitted to use arms – including body armor – for the core lawful purpose of self-defense. Nothing in the Nation’s history or traditions closes the door on that right by permitting a categorical ban on the purchase and sale of a specific type of arm. In sum, New York’s body armor ban violates “the constitutional right to keep and bear arms.” This is another one of the policy choices taken “off the table” by the Second Amendment.