New York City is spitting on a unanimous Supreme Court ruling, and Caetano 2.0 is coming to end it

The bottom line

Ten years after the Supreme Court ruled 8-0 that stun guns are protected arms, New York City is still arresting people for owning them, and a federal appeals court just blessed it by inventing a burden of proof the justices never wrote. The Second Amendment Foundation and Firearms Policy Coalition filed a cert petition on July 7 calling it exactly what it is, Caetano 2.0. If the Court takes this case and fixes the burden question, New Yorkers stop getting prosecuted for defending themselves, and every anti-gun state, Virginia included, loses the legal trick it’s using to keep its bans alive.

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This article is based on analysis from Bearing Freedom. Watch the original video. This is commentary, not legal advice.

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A decade of just saying no

In 2016 the Supreme Court decided Caetano v. Massachusetts, an 8-0 per curiam opinion that took one look at a state supreme court ruling and threw it out. Jaime Caetano was a homeless domestic violence survivor. Her ex-boyfriend had put her in the hospital, restraining orders hadn’t stopped him, and a friend gave her a stun gun. When he cornered her outside her job, she showed it to him and told him to leave. He did. Nobody was hurt. Massachusetts prosecuted her anyway, and its high court upheld the conviction on the theory that stun guns weren’t around at the founding and aren’t the sort of weapon usable by a militia, so the Second Amendment doesn’t cover them. The Supreme Court vacated that in a single paragraph. Every justice agreed. That is about as decisive as constitutional law gets.

The ruling did what it was supposed to do almost everywhere. Massachusetts, Illinois, and Rhode Island had their stun gun bans struck down. New Jersey conceded by consent decree. In 2019 a federal court in Avitabile v. Beach struck down New York State’s ban, and the state didn’t even bother appealing. Stun guns are legal to possess in all fifty states today. There is exactly one jurisdiction left in the country still enforcing a flat ban: New York City, under Administrative Code § 10-135 and Penal Law § 265.01. No permit path, no self-defense exception, up to a year in jail for having one.

Same weapon, same facts, same city that won’t quit

On July 7, 2026, SAF and FPC, represented by Cooper & Kirk, filed a petition for certiorari in Calce v. City of New York, docketed as No. 25-861 in the Second Circuit below. One of the named petitioners, Amanda Kennedy, was attacked while sitting in her car in Brooklyn when a stranger began striking her through the window and tried to force the door open. She displayed her stun gun. The attack ended immediately. Nobody was shot. Nobody went to the hospital. The NYPD showed up, learned she owned an electronic weapon, and charged her with a crime.

That is the Caetano fact pattern rerun a decade later in a different city, and it should tell you something about how defensive gun use actually works in this country. Most defensive uses of a firearm, something like 95 percent by most estimates, never involve firing a shot. Someone shows you they are armed and capable of stopping you, and you leave. That is the entire theory of an armed citizenry: the gun does its job by existing, not by discharging. New York City looked at a woman who successfully stopped an assault without hurting anyone and decided she was the criminal.

How a federal court got around a unanimous Supreme Court ruling

Here is the part that should make you angry even if you have never thought about a stun gun in your life. On April 13, 2026, a Second Circuit panel of Judges Barrington Parker, Raymond Lohier, and Sarah Merriam issued an unpublished summary order affirming a March 2025 district court ruling for the city. They did not defend the merits of New York’s ban. They didn’t have to, because they never got that far.

Bruen set up a two-step test. Step one: does the Second Amendment’s plain text cover the conduct? The Court already answered that for bearable arms broadly, and stun guns plainly qualify. Step two: the government has to prove its regulation is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. That burden sits on the state. It is not supposed to move.

The Second Circuit moved it anyway. Instead of making New York City justify its ban against historical tradition, the panel held that plaintiffs first had to prove, with data, studies, or surveys, that stun guns are in common use today, and it treated the Supreme Court’s own words in Caetano as, in the petition’s words, miscellaneous evidence not sufficient to carry that load. The city never had to defend its law at all. The case ended at a threshold question the panel invented out of nothing, even though the Supreme Court had already settled that stun guns are constitutionally protected arms a decade earlier.

This is not some obscure procedural quirk you can shrug off. Putting the common-use burden on the plaintiff is the exact same maneuver lower courts have used to bless assault weapons bans in Maryland (Bianchi v. Brown, Fourth Circuit), and it’s what Virginia will lean on to defend SB 749 if that case ever reaches the same court. Flip who carries the burden and the anti-gun side wins almost every time, because they never have to produce a historical analogue for banning the most commonly owned rifle or the most common self-defense sidearm in the country. Keep the burden where Bruen put it, on the government, and those bans do not survive contact with the historical record. Nobody has ever found a founding-era tradition of banning the most popular class of arms in the country, because until the last couple decades no court would have dared invent this test to begin with.

Why the timing here is not an accident

Twelve days before this petition was filed, the Supreme Court decided Wolford v. Lopez on June 25, 2026, by a 6-3 margin, and the majority built a hypothetical centered on a Hawaii resident in a fact pattern lifted almost directly from Caetano: someone prosecuted for defending herself with a non-lethal weapon. The Court laid out the plain-text inquiry as three questions, and common use was not one of them. Five days after that, on June 30, 2026, the Court granted cert in Viramontes v. Cook County (No. 25-238) and consolidated it with Grant v. Higgins (No. 25-566) to decide whether the Second Amendment protects the AR-15 as a commonly owned rifle. The justices are already sitting with the exact methodology question this petition raises.

That is why FPC and SAF are calling this Caetano 2.0 and asking for the same treatment: summary reversal, no briefing on the merits, no argument, because the error below is so obvious it does not need a full term to correct. Caetano itself was resolved that way. As of this writing the petition has not yet been assigned a Supreme Court docket number, which is normal this soon after filing, and the City of New York has not yet responded.

I don’t cover every cert petition that crosses my desk. I’m covering this one because the stun guns are almost beside the point. What’s actually on the table is whether federal appeals courts get to keep inventing evidentiary burdens that exist nowhere in Bruen to save gun control laws they’d rather not strike down. New York City has exactly zero legal argument here. It has a decade of defiance and a friendly panel willing to look away. If the Supreme Court does what it did to Massachusetts in 2016, and I think it will, the ruling won’t stay in the five boroughs. It closes off the exact escape hatch Richmond and Sacramento are counting on to keep their own bans alive.