Judge voids New York ban on civilian body armor

On Wednesday in Buffalo, U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra Jr. issued a 47-page opinion in Heeter v. James and struck down New York Penal Law 270.21, the statute that barred most civilians from buying body armor.

Body armor is an arm protected by the Second Amendment.

“Indeed, body armor is an ‘Arm’ protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment. As such, regulation in this area is permissible only if the state demonstrates that the new enactment is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of sufficiently analogous regulations. New York fails that test,” Sinatra wrote.

The law, enacted in 2022, made New York the only state to prohibit most civilians from possessing body armor. It carved out exceptions for law enforcement, peace officers, and military members. A first offense was a class A misdemeanor; any later offense was a class E felony.

Legislators passed the measure after the May 14, 2022, racially motivated mass shooting at Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. Gunman Peyton Gendron killed 10 Black people and wounded three. He wore steel-plated body armor and a tactical helmet. Former Buffalo Police Lt. Aaron Salter Jr., working security that day, returned fire; the rounds were stopped by the armor, and Salter was killed. Gendron pleaded guilty in November 2022 to state murder charges and is serving life without parole. He still faces a separate federal death-penalty trial.

In 2024 the Firearms Policy Coalition and two residents, Benjamin Heeter and Joseph Wurtenberg, sued. They said they wanted to buy body armor for lawful self-defense and could not under the statute. Named defendants included Attorney General Letitia James.

Sinatra applied the Supreme Court’s decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022). Heller established that the Second Amendment covers all instruments that constitute bearable arms, including those not in existence at the founding. Bruen requires the government, once the plain text is shown to cover the item, to prove that its restriction is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of sufficiently analogous arms regulations.

New York argued that modern materials such as Kevlar “were not possessed by early Americans.” It offered medieval and English monarchy-era laws that restricted the wearing of armor, plus Antebellum-era statutes, as historical analogues. Sinatra rejected the comparisons. English monarchs’ armor rules, he held, were irrelevant to the American tradition and ignored the historical reason the right to keep and bear arms is understood as an individual right protecting against public and private violence. The Antebellum evidence likewise failed to show a tradition of reasonable regulation comparable to a near-total civilian purchase ban. The state, he concluded, had not shown modern body armor to be dangerous or unusual in the constitutional sense.

That holding is the constitutional point. Once the text reaches defensive armor, the burden is the state’s, not the citizen’s. A government that criminalizes the purchase of equipment designed only to stop bullets must produce a genuine historical match; New York produced none that survived scrutiny. Limited government and the rule of law require that test to be applied as written, not rewritten around a recent tragedy or a novel category of “military-grade” gear. Public safety that begins by disarming the peaceable person of the means to survive criminal gunfire is not the safety the Second Amendment secures. The ordinary New Yorker who simply wanted a vest for home or work protection was the person the 2022 statute forgot.