Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - A group of Second Amendment civil rights advocates gathered just outside of Old Erie County Hall on Friday in an effort to call on County Clerk Mickey Kearns to expand staffing for pistol permits in the county. This includes the allocation of new or existing employees to supplement the pistol permit office, as well as the addition of some new satellite locations for pistol permit processing.
This call from advocates comes on the heels of the Supreme Court decision on Thursday striking down a New York law requiring people to demonstrate a particular need for carrying a gun in order to get a license to carry a gun in a concealed way in public. This will give Americans the right to carry firearms in public for self-defense, a ruling likely to lead to more people becoming legally armed.
"We're calling on Kearns to not be a typical government agency, where you slow walk this or you take your time, you wait. We're calling on Mickey Kearns to be proactive, and allow the citizens of Erie County to start being able to process these permits to get their right to self-defense sooner than later," said Erie County Libertarian Party (ECLP) Chair Duane Whitmer. "I think across the state, you're gonna see a lot of counties stall, delay, wait for reformation, take their time. We're asking Mickey Kearns to actually do the right thing, step up and be a leader in one of the more populated counties in Upstate New York."
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As for how this decision is expected to impact concealed carry in Erie County and New York State, advocates say it will take the role of judges out of the equation, because there won't be licensing officials to review the special cause element of permits that was in effect under the old regulations.
"What this is likely to come down to is simply the County Clerk's employees running background checks on permit applicants, and if they clear that background check, meaning they don't have a felony conviction, they should be getting a permit right then and there," said Second Amendment Advisor for the ECLP, Steve Felano.
Felano believes that a flood of people have already applied for their pistol permits after Thursday's Supreme Court ruling. He says the website to apply for permits in New York City crashed on Thursday, because of the number of people trying to apply for permits.
As for his analysis of the Supreme Court decision, Felano says it takes the intermediate scrutiny standard, through which courts have been judging Second Amendment cases, off the table. It will no longer be a two-pronged test for people to be approved for their pistol permits.
"The court actually is making legislators go beyond, what's called, 'strict scrutiny', and apply a text history tradition approach to any existing or new gun legislation," he said. "So basically, if any new gun legislation is going to be passed, the legislators have to make a compelling case and go back in history to the founding era, and find laws that are analogous to the ones they hope to pass and show a convincing trend that says that this is what the founders intended.
"Through that lens, I really see this new decision as sort of the death nail of modern gun control. I don't see how any new substantive gun laws to include a renewed assault weapons ban would be able to be passed by the federal government. It's really going to hamstring those efforts."
Felano also believes that actions like the SAFE Act and magazine bans are probably on the chopping block in the near future, and those measures are probably going to go away too.
Hear more from Friday's press conference is available for you in the player below: