Connecticut Judge Blocks Citizen From Carrying a Firearm for Self-Defense on Public Land

In a blatantly unconstitutional, contrived decision, on September 30, a federal judge in Connecticut upheld a ban on the carry of concealed firearms on public land simply because, at times, the trail gets crowded and children may be present.

In the case of David J. Nastri v. Katie S. Dykes, before the United States District Court for the District of Connecticut, United States District Judge Victor A. Bolden denied both the plaintiff’s request for summary judgment and preliminary injunction as related to his ability to carry a firearm for self-defense in Connecticut state parks, and forests.

In his 57-page decision, the judge begins his analysis by stating:

There were no modern style parks around 1791 when the Second Amendment was adopted.

Upon this statement, the judge builds a tortured and circuitous reasoning for why areas that we now term “parks,” also known as public land, have firearms restrictions, in an attempt to draw historical analogs as required by the Supreme Court Bruen ruling.

However, the opinion notes that the prohibition of firearms in Yellowstone Park occurred in 1897 and the banning of firearms in national parks holistically didn’t occur until 1936, both dates which do not coincide with the Bruen requirement of analogs occurring during our founding period, circa 1791.

Katie S. Dykes, defendant in the suit, and Commissioner of the Connecticut Department of Energy and Environment Protection (DEEP), equates the publicly held state land to private property arguing there is no pre-existing right for an individual to carry a firearm on private property against the wishes of the landowner and that this “principle extends to government-proprietors who have the same right to dominion over their lands as any private landowner.”

In perhaps the only element of the decision that the court got right, it disagreed with Miss Dykes writing, “The Court Disagrees. Commissioner Dykes cites to no post-Bruen binding precedent treating the government as a private landowner for purposes of evaluating the plain text of the Second Amendment.”

In a tricky bit of legal maneuvering that points to an inherent weakness in our system, the court decided that Mr. Nastri, who brought the lawsuit, didn’t have standing because he didn’t indicate a specific time at which he was going to visit the Naugatuck State Forest.

Accordingly, Mr. Nastri lacks standing to bring an as-applied challenge to the enforcement of § 23-4-1(c) in Naugatuck State Forest, and this Court therefore lacks jurisdiction to evaluate the merits of this particular claim.

With regard to the two other locations that Mr. Nastri was asserting his as-applied challenge, Sleeping Giant State Park & Farmington Canal Greenway State Park, the court upheld the ban on firearms, writing that the:

…prohibition of firearms in both parks passes constitutional muster because the prohibition is within the well-established tradition and history of regulating firearms in sensitive places due to their quintessentially crowded nature and the fact that they are frequented by children.

If recent history serves our collective memory correctly, the U.S. Supreme Court in Bruen specifically held that:

…there is no historical basis for New York to effectively declare the island of Manhattan a “sensitive place” simply because it is crowded and protected generally by the New York City Police Department.

Another activist judge directly defies the law of the land.