US District Judge John Sinatra of the Western District of New York, a Donald Trump appointee, threw out a provision of New York State law that bans people from carrying guns into churches and other houses of worship, saying it violates the Second Amendment even though the Heller decision, written by dead and rotting Justice Antonin Scalia, explicitly states the Constitution allows state and local governments to restrict weapons in certain places.

Reuters reports that Sinatra cited an earlier Supreme Court decision that struck down a New York law that restricted who and where people could carry concealed weapons.  “The nation’s history does not countenance such an incursion into the right to keep and bear arms across all places of worship across the state,” Sinatra wrote. “The right to self-defense is no less important and no less recognized at these places.”

However the 2008 Heller decision explicitly states that state and local governments have the right to restrict weapons possession.  “[T]he Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the [Second] Amendment or state analogues,” Scalia wrote.  “The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings[.]”