Reb Russell, II v. New Jersey

In District of Columbia v. Heller, this Court held that the Second Amendment protects “the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” 554 U.S. 570, 592 (2008), and in McDonald v. City of Chicago, it determined that this right “is fully applicable to the states,” 561 U.S. 742, 750 (2010). The Courts of Appeals for the District of Columbia and Ninth Circuits have concluded that the right to carry a firearm extends outside of the home and that licensing restrictions that require citizens to show a special need for carrying a firearm effectively “destroy[] the ordinarily situated citizen’s right to bear arms” and therefore are categorically unconstitutional. Wrenn v. District of Columbia, 864 F.3d 650, 666 (D.C. Cir. 2017); accord Young v. Hawaii, 896 F.3d 1044, 1074 (9th Cir. 2018). Contrarily, the First, Second, Third, and Fourth Circuits have upheld substantively indistinguishable “good reason”-based licensing restrictions under a diluted “intermediate scrutiny” analysis, and the state courts below upheld New Jersey’s “justifiable need” restriction absent any apparent scrutiny analysis. The Questions Presented are:

1. Whether the Second Amendment protects the right to carry arms outside of the home for self-defense.

2. Whether the government may deny lawabiding citizens their exercise of the right to carry a handgun outside of their homes by conditioning the exercise of the right on showings of need.