New York makes it incredibly burdensome to exercise your right to keep and bear arms, but to add insult to injury lawmakers in the Empire State have also made it illegal for those outside of certain “eligible professions” to possess body armor; a purely defensive article that the state claims is too dangerous for average, everyday folks like you and me to possess.
Firearms Policy Coalition and several individual plaintiffs are challenging that ban, and on Monday the state of New York issued its reply to FPC’s motion for summary judgment. In it, Attorney General Letitia James argues that, for a variety of reasons, the lawsuit should be dismissed, including the dangerousness claim.
New York argues that modern body armor is a “tactical accessory” and not an “arm” or “armor” under the Second Amendment, isn’t commonly used for self-defense, is “unusually dangerous,” and has a “propensity to terrify the public” https://t.co/UI5ZxFvffO pic.twitter.com/BvsRxN1Ccj
— Firearms Policy Coalition (@gunpolicy) April 28, 2026
James’s first argument is that the plaintiffs don’t have standing to sue, but even if the U.S. District Court allows their case to proceed the law should stand, since body armor isn’t protected by the Second Amendment anyway.
The clearest source for understanding the meaning of “arms” comes from the Founding Fathers themselves, who used the term regularly in legislation designed to ensure “the security of a free state,” U.S. Const. Amend. II, but always in a way that encompassed weapons rather than armor. On May 22, 1794, Congress passed “An Act prohibiting for a limited time the Exportation of Arms and Ammunition, and encouraging the Importation of the same.”
The law explained what was covered by the term “Arms,” namely “any cannon, muskets, pistols, bayonets, swords, cutlasses, musket balls, lead, bombs, grenados [sic], gunpowder, sulphur, or saltpetre,” Id. § 1—weapons and ammunition, in other words, not armor. The Fifth Congress reenacted the law in 1979 with minor changes, again covering the same enumerated list of “Arms.”
So… is James arguing that cannons and grenades are cool under the Second Amendment? Of course not. Those are military arms not meant for civilian hands… much like the body armor that’s prohibited in New York.
James also points out that at the time of the Founding, armor had fallen into disuse among the military, and was virtually unheard of among the citizenry.
Soldiers of that era did not wear metal suits or chain mail, and the protective leather gear of that pre-Kevlar era was notoriously ineffective against bullets, meaning civilians did not typically wear such body protection either. Instead of referring to personal protective gear analogous to modern body armor, the Founders understood the term “armor” in entirely different contexts. According to the corpus data, “armor” typically referred to the protective gear worn by knights, soldiers, or royalty in the distant past, periods long before the Founding Era. Alternatively, the term was used metaphorically. For instance, Founding era texts frequently reference the religious “armor of God” used by believers to fight sin and Satan,t he secular emotional “armor” politicians adopt to debate opponents, or the physical characteristics animals use to protect themselves, such as the “armor” of a hedgehog. In total, “the evidence from the corpus data” makes “clear that the word ‘arms’ in the Second Amendment does not include “armor.”
While James spends a lot of time on the linguistics of “armor” and whether or not its considered an arm, she completely ignores what the Supreme Court said in the Heller decision when it defined “arms.”
The 18th-century meaning is no different from the meaning today. The 1773 edition of Samuel Johnson’s dictionary defined “arms” as “weapons of offence, or armour of defence.” Timothy Cunningham’s important 1771 legal dictionary defined “arms” as “any thing that a man wears for his defence, or takes into his hands, or useth in wrath to cast at or strike another.”
By that metric, body armor is pretty clearly an “arm.” James, though, contends that even if that’s so, body armor is “dangerous and unusual” and therefore unprotected by the Second Amendment.
James says body armor is unusual because the vast majority of sales are to military and law enforcement, and outside of those groups body armor is more typically purchased by armed guards, firefighters, and others in particular professions rather than average civilians. The AG claims these items are dangerous because “it constitutes an unprecedented threat to law enforcement officers.”
Modern ballistic body armor, a tactical asset originally engineered for the battlefield, is “unusually dangerous” precisely because it neutralizes the foundational premise of public defense: that the “good guy with a gun” (particularly a law enforcement officer) can stop the “bad guy with a gun.” It fundamentally alters the dynamic of armed confrontation, transforming its wearer from a vulnerable participant into a fortified threat.
James contends that body armor has become an increasingly common part of a mass shooter’s “toolkit,” pointing not only to the person behind the mass shooting at a Buffalo grocery store that led to New York passing the body armor ban, but the man charged with murdering a Minnesota lawmaker and his wife and critically injuring another as well.
The Supreme Court noted in Heller that handguns were a popular choice for criminals, but they were also commonly possessed by lawful citizens. Even if a significant percentage of the very small number of individuals interested in carrying out a mass shooting purchase body armor, that alone isn’t enough to justify a ban on their use by most New Yorkers, especially if body armor is a popular means of protection among law-abiding citizens as well. And according to this 2022 report by NPR, the civilian market is growing by leaps and bounds.
Most of the companies that spoke with NPR for this story just started within the last decade. Many buyers early on were law enforcement officers or journalists, usually working in hostile environments.
The buyers are far more diverse now.
Many retailers said gun owners are the most common return customer. They purchase body armor as an accessory to go with their weapon, retailers said. But there is growing popularity among people who just want a body shield to wear in everyday life.
“Most people haven’t worn body armor before, and they just want to be able to wear something and feel comfortable that if they were shot with a handgun, they’re gonna be protected,” Goldberg said of National Body Armor’s customers.
If New York’s gun control laws worked as well as people like James like to boast, there’d be no need for a body armor ban because there’d be no demand for body armor in the first place. Clearly, though, there’s a market for these products that’s far bigger than the minuscule number of evil and deranged individuals intent on committing heinous crimes.
I don’t know why New York lawmakers want to make it so difficult for good people to protect themselves, but from the defense of “may issue” carry permits, the expansive number of “gun-free zones” put in place after the state’s permit scheme was struck down, or an outright ban on defensive items like body armor, it’s clear that Empire State Democrats have a real problem with self-protection.
This should be a relatively easy case for the courts. The Supreme Court’s definition of arms clearly encompasses defensive articles like body armor, bans on such items are nowhere to be found at the time of the Founding, and even today the vast majority of states do not impose the kind of prohibitions found in New York. They are in common use for lawful purposes, both in those “eligible occupations” like security guards and paramedics, but also among the civilian population at large. They’re not inherently dangerous, though their use may aid dangerous individuals by making them less susceptible to police firepower.
Is that alone enough to negate the right to keep and bear them? Not from my perspective, but we’ll have to wait and see if U.S. District Judge John Sinatra, Jr. (who had a lot of problems with New York’s Bruen response bill) buys James’s argument that we shouldn’t be allowed to buy a protective vest.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
Help us continue to report on and expose the Democrats’ gun control policies and schemes. Join Bearing Arms VIP and use promo code FIGHT to receive 60% off your membership.
Read the full article here
