“A bill to enforce the rights protected by the Second and Fourteenth Amendments against the States.”
No CRS summary available for this bill.
This section declares congressional findings affirming the Second Amendment right of U.S. citizens to keep and bear arms, including in public for self-defense, as protected against the states via the Fourteenth Amendment and consistent only with the nation's historical tradition of firearm regulation, citing Supreme Court decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008), McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022); and asserting that certain state and local gun control laws, including the criminalization of peaceable public firearms carry, infringe that right and impair the security of a free state.
This section revises section 927 of title 18, United States Code—previously a savings provision preserving state firearms laws absent direct conflict with federal law—to prohibit states and their political subdivisions from imposing criminal or civil penalties or indirectly limiting (including via financial barriers) the public carrying of firearms, ammunition feeding devices, or ammunition by U.S. citizens otherwise eligible to possess them under state and federal law. It declares invalid any state or local statute, ordinance, regulation, custom, or usage that criminalizes, penalizes, or dissuades such public carry; defines "public" to include places held open to the public (excluding private locations with clear prohibitions and state-law screening areas) and "state" to include the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and U.S. possessions; and updates the table of sections for chapter 44.