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

BREYER, J., dissenting 

our society ever further beyond the bounds of the Framers’ 
imaginations,  attempts  at  “analogical  reasoning”  will  be-
come increasingly tortured.  In short, a standard that relies 
solely on history is unjustifiable and unworkable. 

IV 

Indeed, the Court’s application of its history-only test in 
this  case  demonstrates  the  very  pitfalls  described  above. 
The historical evidence reveals a 700-year Anglo-American
tradition  of  regulating  the  public  carriage  of  firearms  in 
general, and concealed or concealable firearms in particu-
lar.  The Court spends more than half of its opinion trying 
to discredit this tradition.  But, in my view, the robust evi-
dence  of  such  a  tradition  cannot  be  so  easily  explained 
away.  Laws regulating the public carriage of weapons ex-
isted in England as early as the 13th century and on this 
Continent  since  before  the  founding.    Similar  laws  re-
mained on the books through the ratifications of the Second 
and Fourteenth Amendments through to the present day.
Many of those historical regulations imposed significantly 
stricter restrictions on public carriage than New York’s li-
censing  requirements  do  today.  Thus,  even  applying  the
Court’s history-only analysis, New York’s law must be up-
held because “historical precedent from before, during, and 
. . . after the founding evinces a comparable tradition of reg-
ulation.”  Ante, at 18 (majority opinion) (internal quotation
marks omitted). 

A. England. 
The right codified by the Second Amendment was “ ‘inher-
ited from our English ancestors.’ ”  Heller, 554 U. S., at 599 
(quoting Robertson v. Baldwin, 165 U. S. 275, 281 (1897)); 
see also ante, at 30 (majority opinion).  And some of Eng-
land’s earliest laws regulating the public carriage of weap-
ons  were  precursors  of  similar  American  laws  enacted