The Second Amendment Foundation filed a petition with the Supreme Court on Tuesday asking the justices to do something they already did ten years ago: tell a state that banning stun guns violates the Constitution.
SAF's certiorari petition targets New York City's blanket prohibition on stun guns and tasers, a ban so sweeping it applies even to residents who hold carry permits. The gun rights organization argues the Second Circuit blessed that ban by mangling the very legal framework the Supreme Court laid down in its unanimous 2016 ruling in Caetano v. Massachusetts.
The case, styled "Calce" based on the petition filing, puts a simple question before the Court: Does a federal appeals court get to ignore binding Supreme Court precedent and rewrite the test for which weapons the Second Amendment protects?
On March 21, 2016, the Supreme Court issued a unanimous, unsigned opinion in Caetano v. Massachusetts, vacating a state court decision that had denied Second Amendment protection to stun guns. The ruling was not close. It was not ambiguous. Every justice signed on.
In a concurrence, Justice Samuel Alito spelled out the practical reality. As the Daily Caller reported, Alito noted that hundreds of thousands of stun guns had been sold across dozens of states:
"While less popular than handguns, stun guns are widely owned and accepted as a legitimate means of self-defense across the country. Massachusetts' categorical ban of such weapons therefore violates the Second Amendment."
That was 2016. A full decade later, New York City still enforces a categorical ban on the same weapons.
SAF's petition does not merely claim the Second Circuit reached the wrong result. It accuses the court of restructuring the constitutional analysis itself, swapping the order of the legal test to reach a predetermined conclusion.
William Sack, SAF's Senior Director of Legal Operations, described the alleged error in blunt terms:
"What the Second Circuit did was they took the common use test that belongs in the second step and they moved it to the first step."
The distinction matters. Under the standard framework, a court first asks whether the weapon at issue falls within the Second Amendment's plain text. Only at the second step does the court consider whether a particular regulation is consistent with the nation's historical tradition of firearms regulation, which is where the "common use" inquiry belongs.
By moving that test to step one, Sack argued, the Second Circuit effectively ruled that the Second Amendment's text does not even cover stun guns, a conclusion flatly at odds with Caetano. The Supreme Court has recently shown willingness to act unanimously on gun rights questions, making SAF's framing of the issue all the more pointed.
"So what they said was the Second Amendment plain text is only implicated if you're talking about arms in common use. That is wrong."
The petition lands at a moment when New York City's political leadership has shown little interest in deferring to the nation's highest court. Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation about the filing.
That silence fits a pattern. Mamdani has previously refused to enforce a Supreme Court ruling on deportation protections, signaling that City Hall views compliance with the Court's decisions as optional when those decisions cut against progressive priorities.
The stun gun ban is a case study in that mentality. The Supreme Court told Massachusetts in 2016 that a categorical ban on stun guns was unconstitutional. New York City, located within the same Second Circuit, kept its own ban in place. When a challenge finally reached the Second Circuit, the appeals court found a way to uphold it.
SAF's petition drew the parallel explicitly. The filing called the current case "essentially Caetano 2.0":
"In Caetano v. Massachusetts, this Court summarily vacated a Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision denying Second Amendment protection to stun guns that blatantly 'contradict[ed] this Court's precedent.' The decision below similarly flouted this Court's precedent to reject a challenge to a ban on stun guns."
The practical effect of New York City's prohibition is worth pausing on. Stun guns and tasers are legal self-defense tools in the vast majority of the country. They are less lethal alternatives to firearms, the kind of option that gun control advocates in other contexts claim to support.
Yet New York City bars them entirely. Even residents who have gone through the city's notoriously burdensome process to obtain a carry permit cannot legally possess a stun gun. SAF's X account put it plainly on July 7: "New York City still bans stun guns and tasers, even for those with carry permits. We just filed a Petition of Certiorari with the Supreme Court to end this unconstitutional restriction on arms protected by the Second Amendment."
The people most affected are not gun enthusiasts looking to make a political point. They are residents, often in high-crime neighborhoods, who want a non-lethal way to protect themselves and their families. The city's position effectively tells them: you may not defend yourself with a firearm, and you may not defend yourself with a less-lethal alternative, either.
SAF's petition arrives as the Supreme Court continues to reshape Second Amendment law after its landmark 2022 decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, which established the historical-tradition test the Second Circuit allegedly misapplied. Lower courts across the country have struggled, or in some cases, resisted, applying Bruen's framework to various weapons regulations.
Progressive officials have responded to the Court's Second Amendment rulings with a mix of legislative creativity and outright defiance. Some Democratic leaders have pushed to pack the Supreme Court rather than accept its constitutional interpretations.
The stun gun case offers the justices a relatively clean vehicle to reassert their authority. Unlike cases involving novel firearm accessories or emerging technology, this one involves a weapon the Court has already addressed, unanimously, and a lower court decision that SAF argues directly contradicts that ruling.
Whether the Court grants certiorari remains to be seen. The petition has been filed, but no conference date or further action has been announced. The justices have shown increasing willingness to enforce their rulings against resistant jurisdictions in other areas of law.
At bottom, SAF's petition asks a straightforward question: Does a unanimous Supreme Court ruling mean anything if a federal appeals court can rearrange the legal test to reach the opposite result a decade later?
The Second Circuit's decision, as described by SAF, did not distinguish Caetano on the facts. It did not argue that stun guns had become less common or less accepted since 2016. It simply moved the goalposts, relocating the "common use" inquiry to an earlier stage of the analysis where it could serve as a barrier rather than a standard.
If that kind of doctrinal gamesmanship stands, it sends a clear message to every lower court in the country: Supreme Court precedent is a suggestion, not a command, as long as you dress up your defiance in procedural language.
New York City has made its position clear through action and silence alike. It kept its ban after Caetano. Its mayor declined to comment on the new challenge. The question now is whether the Supreme Court will remind the city, again, that the Second Amendment is not a local option.
When the highest court in the land speaks unanimously and a city simply shrugs, the problem is not the law. It is the officials who think they are above it.
