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

BREYER, J., dissenting 

actually  support  the  existence  of  an  intent-to-terrify  re-
quirement.  Start with Sir John Knight’s Case, which, ac-
cording to the Court, considered Knight’s arrest for walking
“ ‘about the streets’ ” and into a church “ ‘armed with guns.’ ”  
Ante, at 34 (quoting Sir John Knight’s Case, 3 Mod. 117, 87 
Eng. Rep., at 76).  The Court thinks that Knight’s acquittal
by  a  jury  demonstrates  that  the  Statute  of  Northampton
only prohibited public carriage of firearms with an intent to
terrify.  Ante, at 34–35.  But by now the legal significance
of Knight’s acquittal is impossible to reconstruct.  Brief for 
Patrick J. Charles as Amicus Curiae 23, n. 9.  The primary
source describing the case (the English Reports) was noto-
riously incomplete at the time Sir John Knight’s Case was 
decided.  Id., at 24–25.  And the facts that historians can 
reconstruct do not uniformly support the Court’s interpre-
tation.  The King’s Bench required Knight to pay a surety
to  guarantee  his  future  good  behavior,  so  it  may  be  more
accurate to think of the case as having ended in “a condi-
tional pardon” than acquittal.  Young, 992 F. 3d, at 791; see 
also Rex v. Sir John Knight, 1 Comb. 40, 90 Eng. Rep. 331 
(K. B. 1686).  And, notably, it appears that Knight based his
defense on his loyalty to the Crown, not a lack of intent to 
terrify.  3 The Entring Book of Roger Morrice 1677–1691: 
The Reign of James II, 1685–1687, pp. 307–308 (T. Harris
ed. 2007).

Similarly,  the  passage  from  the  Hawkins  treatise  on 
which the Court relies states that the Statute of Northamp-
ton’s prohibition on the public carriage of weapons did not 
apply to the “wearing of Arms . . . unless it be accompanied 
with such Circumstances as are apt to terrify the People.” 
Hawkins  136.  But  Hawkins  goes  on  to  enumerate  rela-
tively narrow circumstances where this exception applied: 
when “Persons of Quality . . . wea[r] common Weapons, or
hav[e]  their  usual  Number  of  Attendants  with  them,  for 
their Ornament or Defence, in such Places, and upon such
Occasions, in which it is the common Fashion to make use