Kellen Heniford, Everytown for Gun Safety, and Kari Still, Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions have posted Panic! At the Ballroom: The 1804 New Orleans Ballroom Weapons Ban in a Post-Bruen Context, which is forthcoming in the Buffalo Law Review:
In the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decisions in New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n, Inc. v. Bruen in 2022 and United States v. Rahimi in 2024, history has taken a central role in the adjudication of Second Amendment cases. Researchers, courts, and litigators across the country have taken on the arduous task of sifting through archives of our nation’s history in order to compile a record of early American arms regulations. Litigation moves quickly, and too often, historical context is missing or selectively marshaled in these cases. This article builds upon efforts to provide that crucial context, specifically in relation to the history of the United States’ earliest enactments that banned weapons in ballrooms. Within, we (1) identify an as-of-yet uncited ballroom weapons ban in 1804 New Orleans, which is the earliest known regulation of its kind; (2) explicate the historical context surrounding that regulation, as well as the even stricter 1808 and 1817 bans that followed it; and (3) suggest general principles that may be distilled from these restrictions when they are considered within a larger historical tradition. We explain that these early nineteenth-century regulations can be understood as part of a historical tradition of weapons bans under either of two different types of sensitive places: places where there is a high probability of conflict and places where the presence of weapons is incompatible with the actual functioning of the place itself.--Dan Ernst
