The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Wednesday, June 25, that laws requiring gun owners to obtain government permission before possessing or carrying a firearm are unconstitutional — a 6-3 decision split along ideological lines that could upend permit-to-purchase and may-issue licensing schemes across the country.
The majority held that conditioning the exercise of a constitutional right on prior government approval is an undue burden. Critics of such laws have long called them “vampire rules” — a label the case brought into the court’s official lexicon — because they treat the Second Amendment as dormant until the state chooses to activate it.
All six conservative justices sided with the majority. The three liberal justices dissented. No crossover. The divide was that clean.
The ruling doesn’t spell out every law it touches. States and lower courts will now have to work through which permitting structures survive and which don’t — a process that could take years and will almost certainly produce conflicting rulings in the short term.
Arizona already operates as a permitless-carry state, meaning residents don’t need a license to carry a concealed firearm. Wednesday’s ruling doesn’t change day-to-day gun law here in any immediate way, but it does give the state’s existing framework a fresh constitutional endorsement from the nation’s highest court.
The decision arrived roughly four years after the court’s 2022 New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen ruling, which struck down New York’s may-issue carry permitting regime and instructed lower courts to evaluate gun laws against the country’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Wednesday’s ruling appears to extend that logic — pre-approval requirements, the court said, have no deep historical anchor in American law.
Exactly which state and local permitting laws fall within the ruling’s reach hasn’t been fully defined. The court’s opinion, and the precise scope of its holding, wasn’t immediately available.
