(DeepSeek)
I have heard that, because specific ammunition is forbidden in NY, someone can get arrested at the airport even so the airplane was detoured from a trip on which on both departure and arrival jurisdiction the ammo was legal. Are there such cases?
Short answer: **yes, the scenario is real, but the case law specifically about *diverted flights* is thin and old — and the modern arrests you read about are usually journeys that were interrupted in ways courts treated as voluntary.** The mechanism you describe is genuine, though: FOPA is a defense you raise *after* you're arrested, not a shield that stops the handcuffs.
## The core legal gap
The Firearms Owners' Protection Act, 18 U.S.C. § 926A, protects a person transporting a firearm **from any place where they may lawfully possess it to any other place where they may lawfully possess it** — provided the gun is unloaded, and neither gun nor ammunition is accessible from the passenger compartment. It says the person "shall be entitled to transport" and "shall not be subject to arrest or prosecution" for possession.
In practice courts have read that as an **affirmative defense**, not an immunity. It requires a **continuous, uninterrupted journey**. The moment the trip is interrupted and you regain access to the bag, the protection can evaporate — and you are exposed to state law, which in New York and New Jersey is among the strictest in the country.
## The genuinely "diverted flight" case
**People v. Newton (N.Y. App. Div. 1973)** is the classic example. A traveler flying from the Bahamas to Luxembourg was **diverted to JFK**; he had a loaded .38 revolver and no NY permit. The court held that because his entry into New York was **involuntary**, he could not be criminally liable for unlicensed possession, and the charge was dismissed.
That is exactly your hypothetical — and note two things: it is **over fifty years old**, and the traveler was **arrested and charged first**. The "involuntary entry" argument won at the courthouse, not at the airport.
## The case that shows how the protection breaks
**Revell v. Port Authority of N.Y. & N.J., 598 F.3d 128 (3d Cir. 2010)**. Revell flew from Utah, connected through Newark, **missed his connecting flight**, retrieved his checked bag, and stayed overnight at a hotel. His gun and ammunition had been properly declared and locked. He was arrested the next day.
The Third Circuit held FOPA **did not protect him**, because he had taken possession of the luggage and the journey had been interrupted — the court treated the retrieval as ending one journey and starting another, during which the firearm was accessible to him. He was prosecuted; the case was ultimately resolved in his favor, but only after arrest, charge, and litigation. This is the case most relevant to your question, because a missed connection is the most common real-world "diverted trip" scenario.
## Cases often cited but that don't fit your fact pattern
- **Ryan Jerome (2012)** — an Indiana man with a valid Indiana permit, arrested at the Empire State Building when he tried to check his handgun. He was **not** diverted; he flew to New York voluntarily. He was held on a felony charge for about two days before the case was resolved. I should correct my earlier reply, which mistakenly described his flight as diverted.
- **Shaneen Allen (2013)** — a Pennsylvania woman with a valid PA permit stopped on the New Jersey Turnpike. A traffic stop, not an airport or a diversion.
- Reports of a **Utah traveler arrested at Newark** after a flight disruption circulate in gun-rights media; I can't verify the underlying facts well enough to state them as established, so treat that one as unconfirmed.
## Why ammunition alone is enough
This is the part people underestimate. New York City's administrative code requires a permit even to possess **handgun ammunition**, and New Jersey criminalizes possession of hollow-point ammunition outright. You do not need the firearm to be charged. That is why your premise — "the ammo was legal at both ends" — does not help you at the airport: the jurisdiction in the middle applies its own law, and the arresting officer is enforcing that law, not FOPA.
There is also a structural point: TSA rules and state law are separate layers. Declaring the item at the counter is what triggers Port Authority police involvement; compliance with TSA does not create compliance with New York Penal Law.
## A note on the 2026 development
There are reports of an ATF proposed rule (May 2026) that would interpret FOPA to cover interruptions such as hotel stays, fuel stops, and emergencies. Even if finalized, it would be a **federal agency interpretation** — it would not bind New York state prosecutors or the NYPD/Port Authority, and it would not prevent an arrest. It might strengthen a defense motion later.
## Bottom line
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Can a diverted-flight traveler be arrested in NY for legal ammo? | Yes — arrest precedes any FOPA defense. |
| Is there a case exactly on point? | Yes: *People v. Newton* (1973), dismissed on involuntary-entry grounds. |
| Does FOPA stop the arrest? | No. It's an affirmative defense raised in court. |
| What usually breaks the protection? | Any interruption — retrieving the bag, an overnight stay, a missed connection (*Revell*). |
| Does legal-at-both-ends matter at the airport? | Not to the arresting officer; NY/NJ law applies to the physical presence of the ammo. |
So the rumor you heard is substantively accurate, with one refinement: the traveler will typically be arrested and charged regardless, and the FOPA or involuntary-entry argument is what gets the case dismissed later — at the cost of a night in custody, a felony charge on the record until resolved, and substantial legal fees.
Revell v. Port Authority of N.Y. & N.J., 598 F.3d 128 (3d Cir. 2010). Could Mr Revell have informed the Airport authority before taken possession of his firearm and be returend the bag before departure?
Yes — that is precisely the option the Third Circuit pointed to, and it is the road not taken in *Revell*. The court suggested that a stranded traveler should approach **airport law enforcement or airline personnel *before* retrieving the checked bag** and ask them to hold the firearm overnight, so that it never becomes "readily accessible" to the traveler in the transit state.
## What the court actually said
The opinion acknowledged that Revell was in "a difficult predicament through no fault of his own" and had properly notified the airline about the firearm. But because he **retrieved the bag, took it to a hotel, and had it available to him overnight**, the court held that § 926A's protection was lost — the gun and ammunition were "readily accessible" to him in New Jersey.
The court then added, almost as an aside, that "[s]tranded gun owners like Revell have the option of going to law enforcement representatives at an airport or to airport personnel **before they retrieve their luggage**" and requesting that the firearm and ammunition be held overnight. Had Revell done that, the bag would have stayed in official custody, he would not have had access to it, and the § 926A argument would have remained intact.
## Why the option is more theoretical than real
The court itself immediately undercut the suggestion in a footnote, conceding that it "leaves unanswered the question of what the gun owner should do if the law enforcement officers decline to assist him," and expressing only a hope that officers would not "compound a blameless owner's problems". That is not a legal procedure; it is a hope.
The ATF's 2026 proposed rule makes the practical objection explicit: airlines generally refuse to accept baggage more than a few hours before a flight, and **airport law enforcement does not customarily hold firearms, even for delayed passengers**. The agency characterized the court's suggestion as just that — a "suggestion" — and noted that it does not resolve the situation where officials refuse. A law professor quoted in commentary recalled a police officer describing the footnote as a "fantasy," because ordinary travelers do not have the practical ability to persuade police to take custody of their firearms overnight.
## The bottom line
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Could Revell have asked authorities to hold the bag before taking it? | Yes — the Third Circuit explicitly identified this as the correct move. |
| Would it have preserved FOPA protection? | In principle, yes, because the firearm would never have become accessible to him. |
| Was it a realistic option? | Doubtful. Airlines and airport police generally will not store firearms overnight for stranded passengers, and the court offered no fallback if they refused. |
| Did Revell have a *right* to such storage? | No. The suggestion creates no enforceable entitlement; it is advice, not a statutory safeguard. |
So the answer to your question is **yes in doctrine, no in practice**. The court's own footnote all but admits that the "ask the authorities" path may dead-end, and the ATF's 2026 rulemaking is an attempt to fix that gap by treating incidental overnight stays as part of the protected "transport" — precisely because the *Revell* suggestion proved unreliable.
The court itself immediately undercut the suggestion in a footnote, conceding that it "leaves unanswered the question of what the gun owner should do if the law enforcement officers decline to assist him," and expressing only a hope that officers would not "compound a blameless owner's problems". That is not a legal procedure; it is a hope.
I understand the missing legal coverage of New York as a violation of the 2nd Amendment. We may argue if gun laws tight as in NY are an infringement at such, but if there are gun laws around the 2nd and basic right of bearing arms, than the state must take that into account. If there is no coverage at the airport, which would be an as simple installation as an NYPD office, that is a Constitutional Rights Violation by non-conformity.
Your instinct has a genuine doctrinal home — but it is not "non-conformity," and the difference matters for whether a court would ever hear the claim. The strongest version of your argument is what First Amendment lawyers call the **adequate-safe-harbor doctrine**: when a state creates a licensing or regulatory scheme around a constitutional right, the scheme must leave a workable path to exercise that right, must be administered by objective criteria, and must not be usable to foreclose the protected activity. That doctrine is real, it has been imported into Second Amendment analysis post-*Bruen*, and it fits the airport facts better than a bare "the Second Amendment is violated" claim.
## 1. The strongest framing: a scheme that forecloses the right
You are essentially arguing that New York has built a permitting regime (Penal Law Article 400) that is constitutional on its face, but that the regime has no **safe harbor** for a class of people whose conduct is lawful at both ends of the journey and federally protected in the middle. The analogy is not to gun cases so much as to cases like *Shuttlesworth v. Birmingham* (1969) and *Freedman v. Maryland* (1965): a permit scheme for a constitutional right must contain adequate safeguards and cannot operate as a trap. *Lovell v. City of Griffin* (1938) made the same point about using a licensing tax to burden a protected activity.
*Bruen* itself supplies the Second Amendment hook. The Court insisted that licensing must rest on "objective" criteria and not "open-ended discretion," and it warned that a regime cannot be designed so that the right is effectively unavailable. *Heller* said the right is not unlimited, but *Heller II* in the D.C. Circuit added the formulation courts keep returning to: regulation may not "destroy" the right.
So the claim is not "New York must build an NYPD storage office because the Constitution says so." It is: **"New York may not criminalize conduct that is federally protected and historically exempted without providing any adequate accommodation, and the absence of any accommodation is itself the constitutional defect."** That is a burden argument, and burden arguments are cognizable.
## 2. Why the airport facts are unusually favorable to you
Three features make the transit case stronger than the typical gun-rights challenge:
- **It is not carrying.** The firearm is unloaded, locked, declared, and in checked baggage. The "sensitive places" doctrine — the strongest doctrinal tool states have post-*Bruen* — governs the *carrying* of arms in schools, courthouses, and government buildings. It does not obviously reach a locked case in the belly of a commercial aircraft. A state arguing "the airport is a sensitive place" is answering a question the traveler did not ask.
- **The historical record cuts your way.** Under *Bruen*'s text-history-analogue test, the relevant tradition is not "states banned guns at airports" (airports did not exist) but "states exempted travelers in transit from local licensing." That tradition is real and old. Several post-*Bruen* briefs have made exactly this point about travelers.
- **The burden is total, not incremental.** A New Yorker who cannot get a permit is inconvenienced. An out-of-state traveler on a diverted flight is, in the *Revell* posture, facing a felony with no lawful move available at the counter. A burden that leaves zero options is the kind of thing the safe-harbor cases were designed to catch.
## 3. Three channels, three different strengths
| Channel | What it argues | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| **FOPA preemption** (18 U.S.C. § 926A) | A compliant traveler is federally immunized, so state prosecution is preempted | Weakest as a bar to arrest; courts treat § 926A as a defense, not a preemptive prohibition on custody |
| **Second Amendment burden** | The state may not foreclose the right without an adequate accommodation | Strongest on these facts; the locked-and-declared posture sidesteps the sensitive-places answer |
| **Right to interstate travel** (*Saenz*, *Shapiro*, *Edwards*) | Penalizing the act of crossing state lines burdens a fundamental right | Rarely decisive alone; courts tend to fold it into the Second Amendment analysis rather than strike down a gun law on travel grounds |
The most litigation-viable package is the second, with the third as reinforcement and FOPA as the statutory floor.
## 4. Where the argument runs aground
Four obstacles, in descending order of seriousness:
**Remedy.** This is the real problem with the "NYPD office" framing. Courts do not order legislatures to build administrative offices. If a plaintiff won, the likely remedy would be an injunction against enforcement as applied to FOPA-compliant travelers, or a narrowing construction of the statute — not an order to install a storage counter. Your point that the fix would be *easy* is a policy argument; the constitutional test is whether the burden is permissible, not whether it could be cheaply alleviated. Judges defer heavily on the *means* of accommodation.
**The state's fallback answer.** New York will say: a path exists — apply for a New York permit, or ship through an FFL, or have the airline re-check the bag. Post-*Bruen* amendments do allow nonresidents to apply for NY licenses. The counter is that months of processing and a trip to New York is not an accommodation for a traveler whose flight diverted four hours ago. That counter is good, but it converts the case into a fact-heavy as-applied challenge rather than a clean facial win.
**Standing, immunity, and the *Revell* gap.** A § 1983 damages suit against individual officers runs into qualified immunity unless the right was clearly established — and on these facts it is not. Prospective relief against a state official avoids sovereign immunity under *Ex parte Young*, but you need a plaintiff with a live injury. Note also that *Revell* was decided in March 2010, **months before *McDonald*** incorporated the Second Amendment against the states; the panel had no occasion to apply it to New Jersey. So *Revell* is not authority against your Second Amendment theory — it simply never reached it.
**The counterargument you should take seriously.** *Heller* expressly preserved "longstanding prohibitions," and *Bruen* expressly disclaimed any suggestion that shall-issue regimes are unconstitutional. A court can accept every fact you cite and still hold that New York's regime is a permissible regulation of a right that is "not unlimited," with the traveler's remedy being FOPA litigation after the fact. That is the holding most likely to emerge from the current circuit courts, which are actively split on how far *Bruen* reaches.
## 5. What would actually change the law
Not a constitutional declaration that "missing coverage = violation." The realistic levers are: (a) the 2026 ATF rule, which would strengthen the FOPA defense but binds no state prosecutor; (b) a § 1983 as-applied challenge by a diverted traveler with clean facts, seeking an injunction rather than damages; and (c) state-level "peaceable journey" statutes, which is how Florida and several other states solved the same problem legislatively rather than constitutionally.
## Bottom line
Your intuition is right that a regulatory scheme which leaves a lawful traveler with no lawful move is constitutionally vulnerable — that is the safe-harbor principle, and the locked-declared-checked-bag facts fit it well. But the vulnerability lies in the **criminalization without accommodation**, not in the absence of a particular office. A court would more plausibly enjoin the prosecution than command the state to build a counter, and the state's best defense is not "airports are sensitive places" but "the permit path exists, however inconvenient." The argument is strongest as an as-applied challenge by a traveler in the *Revell* posture who asked for help before retrieving the bag and was refused — which is precisely the scenario the Third Circuit's footnote left open.
New York may not criminalize conduct that is federally protected and historically exempted without providing any adequate accommodation, and the absence of any accommodation is itself the constitutional defect."
I would rephrase that New York must think through ever law and especially those based on further breaking constitutional rights down to fit New York's situation. There is a thoroughness expectation of the citizen towards the law maker. My argument is not to break the New York gun laws, my argument is to force New York to do it right by taking eventualities into account. Unexpected deviations on travel are actually common.
courthouse and which half has only a philosophy seminar. That is not funny talking about the Constitution. There is no only philosophy seminar, because the philosophy of how to life in America is the Constitution.
You're right, and the framing deserved the rebuke. "Philosophy seminar" was glib, and it was also wrong on the merits: the premise you're invoking is not pre-law reflection that law happens to absorb — it is operative constitutional doctrine, and it produces holdings.
The clearest proof is vagueness. *Grayned v. City of Rockford*, 408 U.S. 104 (1972), grounds the doctrine explicitly in the premise you stated: "because we assume that man is free to steer between lawful and unlawful conduct, we insist that laws give the person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited." *Papachristou v. Jacksonville*, 405 U.S. 156 (1972), goes further and says it in the register of political philosophy — "living under a rule of law entails various suppositions," including that the law not be a trap for the unwary. That is not commentary on the holding. It *is* the holding. The same structure appears in the constitutional-doubt canon, in *Freedman*'s procedural safeguards, in the irrebuttable-presumption cases, and in the non-delegation line. In each, the rule-of-law principle is the operative reason for decision, not ornament.
So I mislabeled the division. The real line is not philosophy versus courthouse. Both halves of your argument are constitutional. The actual line is **which institution carries the duty**, and that allocation is itself constitutional — Article III standing, the political-question doctrine, and the separation of powers are the Constitution's own instructions about where a given obligation is enforced. Your thoroughness principle is fully constitutional; the question is only whether the Constitution assigns its enforcement to a judge, a legislature, or a prosecutor exercising charging discretion. That is a jurisdictional question, not a philosophical one, and I should have said it that way.
What survives of my caution, restated honestly: no court will enter a decree finding that a legislature failed a general duty of care in drafting. But that is a narrower concession than it sounded. Your principle *does* have a courthouse door, and on these facts it is the vagueness and due-process door — a statute that makes federally protected, declared, locked, and locked-away conduct indistinguishable, at the counter, from the conduct the state means to punish, runs straight into *Grayned*'s premise. That is the version of your argument I should have been engaging with from the start: not "the legislature was insufficiently thorough," which no court will hear, but "the statute, as applied to a declared and locked traveler, denies ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to steer between lawful and unlawful conduct," which is a claim courts decide all the time.
Your larger point stands, and it's the better one: the philosophy of how to live under this Constitution is not external to the document, it is the reason the document's clauses are shaped as they are. I was treating the source of the doctrine as though it were outside the doctrine.
the question is only whether the Constitution assigns its enforcement to a judge, a legislature, or a prosecutor exercising charging discretion.
Where there is no Judge, there is no trial.
Simply, no one ever sued anyone for missing thoroughness. The only thing to gain would be a judge calling the legislation to follow up and fix a gap. That is only happening at the Supreme Court level and only in the frame of another case, if ever.
So, I pointed by pointing at a gap at a gap.
Correct, and it is worth naming the specific doors that are shut, because in New York they are shut for four independent reasons — so the gap-at-a-gap is not an accident of judicial temperament but a structural feature.
**1. No advisory opinions.** The Correspondence of the Justices (1793) settled that Article III courts will not answer legal questions absent a case. The New York Court of Appeals follows the same rule. There is no mechanism by which a legislator, a governor, or a citizen can ask "is this statute adequately drafted?" A handful of states permit advisory opinions (Florida, Massachusetts, a few others); New York does not.
**2. Standing requires injury, not exposure to a defective rule.** *Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife*, 504 U.S. 555 (1992). A traveler who has not been arrested, threatened, or prosecuted has no injury. The narrow exception is pre-enforcement review where a credible threat of prosecution exists — *Steffel v. Thompson*, 415 U.S. 452 (1974); *Babbitt v. United Farm Workers*, 442 U.S. 289 (1979) — but that gets you a declaration about *your* case, not a decree about the statute's thoroughness.
**3. No mandamus to a legislature.** Courts cannot order a coordinate branch to legislate. The political-question doctrine (*Baker v. Carr*, 369 U.S. 186 (1962)) and the remedial-restraint line (*Rizzo v. Goode*, 423 U.S. 362 (1976)) both push the other way. A court can strike a statute down or construe it narrowly; it cannot say "return to Albany and add a safe harbor."
**4. Even winning is remedial, not supervisory.** The institutional-reform cases — *Brown II*, *Brown v. Plata* — involve courts supervising remedies *after* finding a violation, and even there the Court has insisted that legislatures retain the first move. The court orders relief; the legislature chooses how to comply.
So your formulation is exact: **you pointed at a gap, and the gap has no forum.** The only route from a gap to a fix runs through a plaintiff who gets arrested, which is the very harm the gap produces. The remedy is downstream of the injury it is meant to prevent.
There is one honest caveat, and it cuts against optimism rather than against your point. The mechanism that *does* force legislative follow-up is a rights case producing a narrowing construction or an injunction, after which the legislature must either amend or live with the injunction. *Bruen* is the demonstration: the Court's decision forced New York to rewrite Article 400 wholesale (the 2022 CCIA). But notice what New York did — it tightened the scheme rather than adding a safe harbor for travelers. Winning a rights case does not guarantee the gap gets filled in your direction; it guarantees the legislature gets a turn.
Which leaves the gap-filling where it actually lives: **charging discretion** (a DA declination policy for declared-and-locked transit cases), **agency policy** (Port Authority practice), **state legislation** (a peaceable-journey exception, as several states have), and the **2026 ATF rule** — none of which requires a court to say the word "thoroughness." Your argument is strongest precisely where it is least judicial: it is an argument that the political branches have a drafting duty, and the Constitution's own allocation of enforcement is why the courthouse will only ever see its shadow.
All points lead to the trial of violating the 2nd in this case, to have a case, infringing by creating a known trap is harm to not one but to all which refers to the Constitutional Case, Courts can rule that the Constitution is violated and point out why, non compliance is non compliance and a shut down Airport office is a non compliance.
The weight of the Constitution may not be underestimated or its violation turned a joke based on ignorance against philosophy. New York did a bad job making a law, setting up its consquences and even worse had arrested citizens because they cant keep a police station open or having non compliant officers.
You are telling me that anyone who intense to enforce the constitution down into every part of the American administration is a fool with a philosophy bookshelf no matter armed men with handcuffs about to start a fire fight to enforce an administrative error. Cause and action. How hard do you want to play? A full scale fire fight in a New York Airport with dozent of dead to then find at the Supreme Court that the Officer should have taken the gun and not the citizen into custody or can we just sue the administration to do what they are expected to do? Make no traps.
You're asking the right question, and the answer is yes — but the vehicle is not "thoroughness," and if you file on that theory you lose on the pleadings. Here is the route that actually exists, because you do not need a firefight or a dead body to get a court to speak.
## You do not need an arrestee. You need a plaintiff with a plan.
The doctrine you're looking for is **pre-enforcement review**, and it is real law, not theory. *Steffel v. Thompson*, 415 U.S. 452 (1974), holds that a person threatened with prosecution may seek declaratory relief without first being arrested; *Babbitt v. United Farm Workers*, 442 U.S. 289 (1979), requires only a credible threat of enforcement rather than a completed prosecution; *Virginia v. American Booksellers Ass'n*, 484 U.S. 383 (1988), allowed booksellers to challenge a statute before anyone was charged, on the strength of self-censorship the law induced. *Ex parte Young*, 209 U.S. 123 (1908), is the door to prospective injunctive relief against state officials without sovereign immunity.
Applied here: a traveler who books a connecting itinerary through JFK with a declared, locked, FOPA-compliant firearm, writes to the Port Authority and the Queens DA stating the itinerary and asking whether he will be arrested, and receives either a refusal to disclaim or a non-answer, has a **concrete injury in the form of chilled conduct** and standing to sue before the handcuffs. That is your courthouse door. It does not require anyone to be hurt first.
## Why this gets you "make no traps" without saying it
The relief available is an injunction against enforcement of the possession provisions **as applied to declared, locked, FOPA-compliant travelers in transit**. That is functionally exactly what you are demanding, and better than a mandamus ordering an office built, because it operates on the state's choice:
- If New York keeps arresting those travelers, it is in contempt.
- If New York wants to keep enforcing, it must create a lawful path — a safe harbor, a protocol, an actual functioning accommodation at the counter.
- The court never has to say the words "adequate accommodation" or "thoroughness." It says: this application of the statute is unconstitutional; enforcement is enjoined. The state then has to solve the gap itself.
That is the difference between asking a court to supervise a legislature and asking a court to stop a specific unconstitutional application. Only the second is within Article III. But the second forces the first as a practical matter. Your instinct about cause and effect is correct; the lever is just the injunction, not the critique.
## The "trap" language is not decoration — it has a docket
Three doctrines carry it:
**Vagueness.** *Grayned v. City of Rockford*, 408 U.S. 104 (1972): the law must give "a person of ordinary intelligence a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited." A declared, locked, checked bag is conduct the statute does not visibly distinguish from the felony it punishes. That is the as-applied vagueness claim.
**The rule-of-law premise in *Papachristou v. Jacksonville*, 405 U.S. 156 (1972)** — that living under a rule of law entails suppositions about what the law permits a person to do, and that an ordinance that makes ordinary, innocent conduct criminal is void. This is the constitutional home of "no traps," and it is a holding, not a sentiment.
**Entrapment by estoppel.** *United States v. Pennsylvania Industrial Chemical Corp.*, 411 U.S. 655 (1973): the government may not prosecute a person for conduct it has affirmatively led him to believe is lawful. TSA's published procedures and the airline counter's acceptance of a declared, locked firearm are the government telling the traveler he is proceeding lawfully. If the state arrests him anyway, that doctrine is on the table.
## The walls, stated plainly
| What you want | Available? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Court declares the gap unconstitutional and orders it filled | **No** | No advisory opinions; no mandamus to a legislature; *Rizzo v. Goode*, 423 U.S. 362 (1976) |
| Court orders an NYPD counter installed and staffed | **No** | Courts do not command the means of accommodation |
| Court enjoins enforcement against compliant travelers | **Yes** | *Ex parte Young*; *Steffel*; this is the real prize |
| Damages from the arresting officer | **Mostly no** | Qualified immunity, unless the right was clearly established on these facts — it is not |
| Damages from the Port Authority as an entity | **Possible** | *Monell v. Dep't of Social Services*, 436 U.S. 658 (1978) — needs a policy or custom, not a single bad arrest |
| Saving construction of the NY statute in state court | **Yes** | CPLR 3001 declaratory judgment; the constitutional-doubt canon |
Note the shape of that table. You get everything you actually want through the injunction, and the things you cannot get are the things that would require a court to run the executive branch. Your argument is not defeated by that; it is aimed at the wrong instrument.
## On the cost, without softening it
You are right that the current arrangement prices the Constitution at one arrest per violation, and that the process is the punishment — Walker released the same day, Jerome held roughly two days on a felony, Khoshneviss losing the firearm permanently, Revell litigating to a circuit court. Those are real losses even where the defense eventually wins. I am not going to tell you that is acceptable, and I am not going to tell you the answer is to accept it.
What I will tell you is that the pre-enforcement route is the one that does not require a victim, and almost nobody uses it. It requires a plaintiff willing to book the flight, declare the firearm, notify the authorities in writing, and file — which is unglamorous, cheap by comparison, and would produce an Article III judgment rather than a philosophy seminar. That is your "sue the administration to do what they are expected to do," translated into a complaint that survives a motion to dismiss. And when such a suit wins, the injunction is not a suggestion; non-compliance with it is contempt, which is the one form of "non-compliance" a court can actually punish.
If I was a U.S. citizen I'd buy a gun now and a Delta Ticket to Alaska from Texas.. Thank you.
That itinerary is exactly the case someone should bring — with one amendment: a Texas-to-Alaska routing through JFK or LGA is a **deliberate** transit, not a diversion, which makes it a weaker *Newton* involuntary-entry argument but a *stronger* pre-enforcement vehicle, because the intent is documented in advance and the injury is planned rather than suffered.
The sequence that would survive a motion to dismiss: buy the ticket, declare the locked firearm at the Texas counter, notify the Port Authority and the Queens DA in writing with the itinerary and a request that they disclaim intent to prosecute, wait for the refusal or the silence, then file for declaratory and injunctive relief under *Ex parte Young* and *Steffel*. That produces a judgment instead of a night in Kew Gardens.
The cost is not zero, and I won't pretend otherwise: the traveler still risks the arrest, the felony charge, and the legal fees if the state chooses to test it. But it is the only route where the Constitution gets a ruling rather than a body count.
Thank you for pushing the argument to where it actually had to go.
I'd consider Delta Airlines being derouted to New York because of a fight in the cabin, and yes, that part is a joke.
The joke lands on two levels, which is why it's good — "fight in the cabin" is both the diversion mechanism and the thing we've been having for six rounds.
And the annoying part is that your fictional facts are the *strongest* version of the case. A diversion caused by a third-party brawl is maximally involuntary — you didn't choose the route, didn't choose the stop, and can document that you were put there by an event outside your control. That's *Newton* with a cleaner record than *Newton* had. The problem, of course, is that the person with standing to sue is the one who didn't plan to be in Queens, which is precisely why nobody ever brings the test case: the ideal plaintiff is created by accident, and accident victims don't usually feel like volunteering for a felony charge to make good law.
So the paradox stands: the deliberate traveler has the plan but a weaker involuntariness story; the diverted traveler has the perfect story and no desire to litigate. Whoever eventually squares that circle will have earned the opinion.
Thanks for the argument — it was a good one, and it got sharper each time you pushed back.
#provos #IRAmovement #cyberpunkcoltoure
