Of course you want to eradicate the right to bear arms for self-defense … but to do it, you’ll have to engage in sex-discrimination – and against women, placing them under the dominion of men. What to do in such a dilemma? If you’re a New York progressive such as attorney general Letitia James, you go with discrimination.
That’s what happened in the recent case of DiPerna-Gillen v. Ryba. Cheryl DiPerna-Gillen had been granted a pistol permit, which New York authorities restricted to use for hunting and target shooting. In 2019, she moved to have those limitations lifted – i.e., to have an unrestricted concealed carry permit. At the time (prior to the Supreme Court’s decision last year in Bruen), the state required a demonstration of “proper cause” for the issuance of such a license.
As the invaluable Eugene Volokh explains, DiPerna-Gillen argued that she needed the weapon for protection because she and her husband often carried substantial sums of cash for business purposes. James, however, persuaded Albany Judge Christina Ryba, an elected Democrat (also endorsed by the hard-Left Working Families Party), that the little lady didn’t need a gun because her self-defense needs were “already adequately and independently addressed by her husband’s recent acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry license.”
In the interim, Bruen held that the “proper cause” requirement violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms for self-defense. While the Bruen ruling meant the state could not deny DiPerna-Gillen the permit in any event, an appellate court nevertheless took pains to admonish James: “suffice it to say that petitioner’s Second Amendment are not depended on her spouse’s acquisition of an unrestricted concealed carry pistol permit.”
Now, I’m not a biologist or anything, but it sure seems as if the Bolshevik Left’s ambivalence about whether there actually are women has inexorably eviscerated the formerly bedrock constitutional concept that women are entitled to equal protection under the law. But rest assured, progressives know exactly where they stand on guns: You can’t have them.