Writing for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas held that the “proper cause” requirement to obtain a firearm violated the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms. He emphasized that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home, writing that “[n]othing in the Second Amendment’s text draws a home/public distinction with respect to the right to keep and bear arms.”

Thomas criticized the two-step framework developed by the Courts of Appeals to analyze Second Amendment challenges, which combined history with a means-end scrutiny test. Thomas asserted that this approach was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and McDonald v. Chicago (2010), which emphasized a test rooted in the Second Amendment’s text and history. Thomas explained, “[w]hen the Second Amendment’s plain text covers an individual’s conduct, the Constitution presumptively protects that conduct.”

Thomas argued that the government must demonstrate that firearm regulations are consistent with the Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. He rejected the intermediate scrutiny standard often applied in lower courts, stating, “[t]he very enumeration of the right takes out of the hands of government—even the Third Branch of Government—the power to decide on a case-by-case basis whether the right is really worth insisting upon.”

Thomas reviewed the historical context of public carry regulations, examining laws from the late 1200s to the early 1900s. He concluded that there was no historical tradition justifying New York’s restrictive licensing regime. He noted, “[h]istorical evidence that long predates or postdates either time may not illuminate the scope of the right,” underscoring that the relevant history must align with the understanding of the right when the Second and Fourteenth Amendments were adopted.

In his analysis, Thomas dismissed the respondents’ reliance on English history and early American laws that restricted public carry. He found that such laws were either too ambiguous or did not impose a comparable burden to New York’s “proper cause” requirement. Thomas highlighted that American governments historically did not broadly prohibit the public carry of commonly used firearms for personal defense.

Thomas concluded, explaining that right to keep and bear arms is not a second-class right. He wrote, “[w]e know of no other constitutional right that an individual may exercise only after demonstrating to government officers some special need. That is not how the First Amendment works when it comes to unpopular speech or the free exercise of religion. It is not how the Sixth Amendment works when it comes to a defendant’s right to confront the witnesses against him. And it is not how the Second Amendment works when it comes to public carry for self-defense.”