SAF and FPC Just Asked SCOTUS to Take New York’s Park Carry Ban

The petition is captioned In the Supreme Court of the United States, dated September 16, 2026. Petitioners: Brett Christian, Firearms Policy Coalition, Second Amendment Foundation. Respondents: Steven G. James, in his official capacity as Superintendent of the New York State Police, and Michael J. Keane, in his official capacity as District Attorney for the County of Erie, New York. Counsel of record: David H. Thompson of Cooper & Kirk, PLLC. Three questions presented. One: whether New York’s ban on possession of firearms in public parks violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments. Two: whether the Second Circuit erred by rejecting the challenge to an “undifferentiated ban” because history might support a ban in urban parks. Three: whether late-19th-century laws can set the scope of the right “in the absence of historical support from the Founding era.”

Bearing Arms’ Cam Edwards reported September 17 that the Concealed Carry Improvement Act is the statute, that Christian follows Antonyuk, and that the district court wrote it would have declared the parks issue for the plaintiffs on this record if Second Circuit precedent did not bind it. The petition’s theory of facial challenges is the machine. If a court can save any gun ban by pointing at a courthouse, a violent felon, or a rocket launcher inside the same statute, almost nothing is facially invalid. The Founding-versus-1868 split is the other ask: Third, Fifth, and Eighth Circuits versus Second and Ninth. This is a petition. The Court has not granted it. Koons/Siegel in the Third Circuit is still out. Christian is the park case New York already won below — and the one SAF and FPC just walked up the marble steps.