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Page Number: 66

60  NEW YORK STATE RIFLE & PISTOL ASSN., INC. v. BRUEN 

Opinion of the Court 

other,  more  contemporaneous  historical  evidence.    Heller, 
554 U. S., at 632. 

Second, because these territorial laws were rarely subject
to judicial scrutiny, we do not know the basis of their per-
ceived  legality.    When  States  generally  prohibited  both 
open and concealed carry of handguns in the late-19th cen-
tury, state courts usually upheld the restrictions when they
exempted  army  revolvers,  or  read  the  laws  to  exempt  at 
least that category of weapons.  See, e.g., Haile v. State, 38 
Ark.  564,  567  (1882);  Wilson  v.  State,  33  Ark.  557,  560 
(1878); Fife v. State, 31 Ark. 455, 461 (1876); State v. Wil-
burn, 66 Tenn. 57, 60 (1872); Andrews, 50 Tenn., at 187.30 
Those state courts that upheld broader prohibitions with-
out  qualification  generally  operated  under  a  fundamental 
misunderstanding of the right to bear arms, as expressed 
in Heller.  For example, the Kansas Supreme Court upheld
a complete ban on public carry enacted by the city of Salina
in 1901 based on the rationale that the Second Amendment 
protects  only  “the  right  to  bear  arms  as  a  member  of  the
state militia, or some other military organization provided 
for by law.”  Salina v. Blaksley, 72 Kan. 230, 232, 83 P. 619, 
620  (1905).  That  was  clearly  erroneous.    See  Heller,  554 
U. S., at 592. 

Absent  any  evidence  explaining  why  these  unprece-
dented prohibitions on all public carry were understood to
comport  with  the  Second  Amendment,  we  fail  to  see  how 
they inform “the origins and continuing significance of the
Amendment.”  Id., at 614; see also The Federalist No. 37, 

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30 Many other state courts during this period continued the antebellum 
tradition of upholding concealed carry regimes that seemingly provided 
for open carry.  See, e.g., State v. Speller, 86 N. C. 697 (1882); Chatteaux 
v. State, 52 Ala. 388 (1875); Eslava v. State, 49 Ala. 355 (1873); State v. 
Shelby, 90 Mo. 302, 2 S. W. 468 (1886); Carroll v. State, 28 Ark. 99 (1872); 
cf. Robertson v.  Baldwin,  165  U. S.  275, 281–282  (1897)  (remarking  in
dicta that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms . . . is not in-
fringed by laws prohibiting the carrying of concealed weapons”).