In a significant victory for New York gun owners, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit has struck down the state’s so-called “Vampire Rule,” which bizarrely prohibited licensed concealed carriers from entering any “place of worship” or “place of amusement” after dark. The court ruled that this after-sunset restriction on lawful carry has no historical analogue in the nation’s traditions of firearm regulation and therefore fails Bruen’s history-and-tradition test. Coming just two years after the Supreme Court’s landmark New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen decision gutted the state’s discretionary “may-issue” permitting scheme, this latest smackdown shows federal courts are slowly forcing Albany to confront the constitutional reality that shall-issue licensing means shall-issue carry, not carry with a thousand arbitrary strings attached.

The Vampire Rule was always one of the more absurd inventions of New York’s post-Bruen compliance legislation. By tying the legality of self-defense to the position of the sun, lawmakers essentially told permit holders they could defend themselves during daylight hours but had to become defenseless the moment streetlights flickered on. The Second Circuit correctly recognized this as the kind of discretionary, feel-good restriction that Bruen was designed to eliminate. What makes this ruling particularly satisfying is that it comes from the Second Circuit itself, the very court that spent decades rubber-stamping New York’s restrictive gun laws before the Supreme Court forced it to change course. The panel’s willingness to actually apply Bruen rather than creatively evade it suggests the lower courts are finally internalizing that the Second Amendment is not a second-class right.

For the 2A community, this decision is both encouraging and cautionary. It proves that persistent litigation pays dividends and that even the most progressive circuits cannot completely ignore the Supreme Court’s framework. Yet it also highlights how New York and other anti-gun states will continue inventing ever-more-creative ways to burden the right to bear arms until the courts or Congress draw a harder line. The Vampire Rule may be dead, but the broader patchwork of “sensitive place” restrictions, sensitive times restrictions, and good-cause requirements remains under litigation across the country. Each successive win chips away at the post-1994 mindset that treated lawful carry as an exotic privilege rather than a constitutional guarantee. The Second Amendment is not a suggestion, and courts are increasingly reminding blue states of that uncomfortable truth.