Stephen Halbrook | 10.8.2025 9:58 PM

After a long delay (see post here), on September 10 the Third Circuit finally reached a decision in Koons v. Attorney General of New Jersey, which upheld many of New Jersey's prohibitions on firearm possession in public places.  Like a handful of other states, New Jersey reacted to New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass'n v. Bruen, which invalidated New York's limitation of handgun carry licenses to persons with a "proper cause," by a sweeping ban on places where firearms may be possessed.

Bruen held: "When the Second Amendment's plain text covers an individual's conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct. The government must then justify its regulation by demonstrating that it is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation."  Yet as explained below, Koons would rely heavily upon a fake citation that misled it to get that historical tradition backwards.  Further, while firearms may be restricted in certain "sensitive places," Bruen continued, that does not include "all places of public congregation that are not isolated from law enforcement."  But Koons held just the opposite about many such places.

In setting about to find Founding-era analogues to that of New Jersey, Koons correctly read the 1328 Statute of Northampton as providing that "going armed offensively was prohibited in fairs, markets, in the presence of justices or ministers, or in similar places."  It added that two states enacted versions of that offense, including a 1786 Virginia statute with an explicit "terror" element.  For North Carolina, it cited A Collection of Statutes of Parliament of England in Force in the State of North Carolina 60–61 (Francois-Xavier Martin ed., 1792), which it referred to as "hereinafter N.C. Statute of Northampton."

Far from being a law, Martin's Collection was a self-published book that simply reprinted, among other British laws, the Statute of Northampton.  Citing Justice Breyer's dissent in Bruen, Koons continued, "North Carolina's 1792 statute was so traditional that it retained references to the King."  Yet this "statute's" six references to "the King," supposedly enacted sixteen years after independence was declared, should have been a dead giveaway that North Carolina enacted no such law.

For its purported Founding-era analogues, Koons is a cookie-cutter repetition of the flawed Second Circuit's decision in Antonyuk v. James (2024), which initiated a false history of Founding-era law to uphold New York's wide-ranging ban on where firearms may be possessed.  Antonyuk began with the Statute of Northampton's language that one shall "bring no force in affray of the peace, nor to go nor ride armed … in Fairs [or] Markets…." But Bruen held that the Statute "has little bearing on the Second Amendment adopted in 1791."  As held in Sir John Knight's Case (1686), the Statute applied only to "go[ing] armed to terrify the King's subjects" with evil intent, a........

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