By Teresa Mulvaney
BUFFALO — A federal judge in Buffalo has struck down the body armor ban New York lawmakers passed in the weeks after the Tops massacre on Jefferson Avenue, ruling that bulletproof vests are “arms” protected by the Second Amendment. The decision came out the same day Gov. Kathy Hochul signed two more gun bills.
U.S. District Judge John L. Sinatra Jr. granted summary judgment Wednesday in Heeter v. James, a 2024 lawsuit brought by the Las Vegas-based Firearms Policy Coalition and two of its members, Benjamin Heeter and Joseph Wurtenberg. In his 47-page decision and order, he permanently barred the state from enforcing the purchase and sale ban.
He also paused his own order for 14 days so the state can appeal. That stay runs out in early November, just after Election Day.
What the judge decided
The 2022 law, S.9407-B/A.10497, made it a crime to buy body armor unless the buyer works in an eligible profession, such as law enforcement or the military. It also barred businesses from selling armor to everyone else. Under the state’s definition, body armor is “any product that is a personal protective body covering intended to protect against gunfire.” A first violation was a class A misdemeanor, and later ones were felonies.
Sinatra wrote that the law fails the history-and-tradition test the U.S. Supreme Court set out in its 2022 Bruen decision.
“Body armor is an ‘Arm’ protected by the plain text of the Second Amendment,” Sinatra wrote. “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.”
The state had argued that body armor “is not an ‘Arm’ as the term would have been commonly understood in 1791 or 1868,” and that it is, “at most,” better understood “as a tactical accessory to firearms,” according to the ruling’s summary of its briefs. Sinatra rejected both points. He cited the plaintiffs’ market estimates that Americans bought more than 93,000 units of body armor in 2025 as evidence that the gear is in common use.
In his conclusion, the judge wrote that the state “failed to set forth any evidence on which a factfinder could conclude that body armor—a purely defensive arm—is ‘uniquely designed to create mayhem.’”
He also brushed aside the state’s argument that a 2025 Supreme Court ruling limiting universal injunctions, Trump v. CASA, should keep him from blocking the law statewide. That case dealt with nationwide orders against federal executive action, he wrote, not with stopping enforcement of a state statute. The order also covers the Erie County and Monroe County district attorneys, who were named as defendants because they would prosecute violations.
On the stay, Sinatra wrote that he “disagrees that the State is likely to succeed on the merits of any appeal.” He granted it anyway. He noted that a state blocked from enforcing its own statutes “suffers a form of irreparable injury,” and that the plaintiffs never sought a preliminary injunction against a law that had been on the books since 2022.
A law written in Buffalo’s grief
Hochul signed the body armor ban on June 6, 2022, as part of a 10-bill package. Her office described the package as closing “critical gun law loopholes exposed by shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde.” The gunman who killed 10 Black people at the Tops Friendly Markets store on May 14, 2022, wore armor that stopped a round fired by the store’s security guard, retired Buffalo police officer Aaron Salter Jr., who was killed.
“Gun violence is an epidemic that is tearing our country apart. Thoughts and prayers won’t fix this, but taking strong action will,” Hochul said at the 2022 signing. She said the package “bans body armor sales outside of people in select professions.”
Attorney General Letitia James, who now defends the law in court, said then that “New York will continue to lead in imposing reasonable gun laws that keep our people safe.”
Assembly Majority Leader Crystal Peoples-Stokes, the Buffalo Democrat whose district includes the Tops store, said in 2022 that lawmakers had “closed loopholes for combat equipment and military-grade weapons.”
In legal papers filed this summer, the attorney general’s office warned that the lawsuit asked the court “to become the first federal court ever to hold that body armor – including the military-grade armor increasingly used by mass shooters, including the Buffalo Tops shooter – is a constitutional right,” The Buffalo News reported. The attorney general’s office said Wednesday it was reviewing the ruling, Courthouse News Service reported.
The challengers
The Firearms Policy Coalition cast the decision as a first. In a statement, the group called it “the first known federal Second Amendment judgment striking down a general ban on the purchase of defensive body armor.”
“Governor Hochul and Attorney General James actually made it a crime for peaceable people to buy body armor—equipment designed to stop bullets and save lives—and had the tyrannical audacity to call that ‘public safety,’” said Brandon Combs, the coalition’s president. “Not satisfied with banning guns, they tried to ban the means of surviving criminal gunfire, too.”
The plaintiffs’ lawyer, Nicolas J. Rotsko, argued in a filing that “tragic mass shooting events cannot be a justification for depriving law-abiding citizens of the means to protect themselves,” according to The Buffalo News.
Albany keeps legislating
On Wednesday, the day Sinatra signed his order, Hochul was at the New Yorkers Against Gun Violence benefit dinner signing two more gun measures. One, S.7236/A.7983, bars anyone prohibited from owning a rifle or shotgun, or subject to a temporary or extreme risk protection order, from buying ammunition. The other, A.1962-B/S.9629, known as “Francesco’s Law,” requires guns to be locked up when they are not in use, whether or not children live in the home.
“Today, I’m proud to make our nation-leading laws even stronger to keep guns and ammunition out of the wrong hands and make our children and communities safer,” Hochul said.
“If a person fails a background check to buy or possess a shotgun or rifle, they should also be unable to purchase ammunition,” said Assemblymember Jeffrey Dinowitz, a Bronx Democrat who sponsored the ammunition bill.
The governor’s release did not mention the body armor ruling.
What happens next
The ban stays enforceable until the 14-day stay expires. If the state appeals, it can ask the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit for a longer stay while that court hears the case. The Second Circuit has upheld most of New York’s post-Bruen gun laws. Unless a court extends the stay, Wednesday’s ruling means a law passed because of a Buffalo massacre could become unenforceable just after voters pick a governor in a race where public safety has become the most contentious issue.
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