Heeter and Wurtenberg v. James (W.D.N.Y. 2026)
New York enacted a first-of-its-kind law prohibiting law-abiding residents who are not engaged or employed in an eligible profession- from purchasing body armor for self-defense. New York enacted this legislation "to further strengthen gun laws." New York's body armor legislation, however, violates the Second Amendment. This result is dictated by the teaching of the Supreme Court's cases addressing individual Americans' right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, body armor is an "Arm" protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment. As such, regulation in this area is permissible only if the State demonstrates that the new enactment is consistent with the Nation's historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations. New York fails that test.
You may wondering, even before the constitutional question comes into focus, how banning most people from buying body armor strengthens gun laws. Body armor kills no one. The reason is that some mass murderers have worn body armor to protect them from police or even, horror of horrors, civilians defending themselves or others. Doubtless done for that reason and once this was widely reported "because all the cool mass murderers are doing it." (Journalists could leave this detail out, along with the attention-seeker's name: the ignominy of forgetting an evil person's name.) I am pretty sure every mass murderer got to the scene of the crime by motor vehicle. Would limiting possession of such be similarly justified?
Of course, all body armor does is require a murderer to get close for a head shot. If you are wearing body armor, you better be ready to return fire. The analogy to armored knights is really clear. Once you unhorsed a knight, even if by making his horse a longbow pincushion, the hoi polloi still needed to get in close enough to hack him apart with axes and halberds. (The skeletons with halberd injuries are horrifying to see.)
The real issue here is that body armor makes people safer, or at least makes people feel safer. Nothing terrifies the gun banners more than people being safe. How much fascism can you build on top of people who feel safe?
Back to the constitutional question:
The State points to the Statute of Northampton for support for its position that there is a long-standing tradition of restricting who can purchase body armor. See Dkt. 77-1 at 29-31. The law prohibited anyone to "go, nor ride armed by night, nor by day, in fairs markets, nor in the presence of the justices or other ministers, nor in no part elsewhere, upon pain to forfeit their armor to the King and their bodies to prison, at the king's pleasure." ...
The State's analogy to the Statute of Northampton is an attempt to justify its body armor ban by speculating that individuals only wear body armor to terrify the public. See Dkt. 77-1 at 37-38. Yet, this ignores the reality put forth by Plaintiffs, that the public is more likely to reach for body armor to protect themselves from terrifying circumstances. Dkt. 80 at 42. In Rahimi, the Supreme Court concluded that "[a]n individual found by a court to pose a credible threat to the physical safety of another may be temporarily disarmed consistent with the Second Amendment." Rahimi, 602 U.S. at 702. Here, however, the State is suggesting that a merely broad-based suspicion over the population at large is sufficient to justify a universal ban on the sale and purchase of a specific type of arm. And to the extent that the State analogizes this to prohibiting criminals from purchasing body armor, other statutes already criminalize the use of body armor while committing violent crimes. See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 931(a); 34 U.S.C. § 10534(d)(l); U.S.S.G. § 2K2.6; N.Y. PENAL LAW§ 270.20. The State's categorical prohibition of a specific type of arm to law abiding citizens at large, is untethered from any historical tradition-including the Statute of Northampton.
I would have also pointed out that even within the historically irrelevant Statute of Northampton meaning. Legal writing after 1328 recognized that the Statute prohibited wearing armor not carrying arms. In the nineteenth century, a manual for justices of the peace discussing the Statute explained that “A man cannot excuse the wearing of such armour in public.”[1] Even as to wearing arms in the modern sense, this volume is clear that “no wearing of arms is within the meaning of this statute, unless it be accompanied with such circumstances as are apt to terrify the people…”[2] Concerning those wearing armor under their clothes: “And persons armed with privy coats of mail, to the intent to defend themselves, against their adversaries, are not within the meaning of this statute, because they do nothing in terror of the people.”[3]
[1] Thomas Walter Williams, 1 The Whole Law Relative to the Duty and Office of a Justice of the Peace..., 2nd ed., 29 (1808).
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