Supreme Court Strikes Down D.C. Ban on Handguns
The Supreme Court, splitting along ideological lines, today declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns for self-defense, striking down the District of Columbia’s ban on handgun ownership as unconstitutional.
The 5 to 4 decision was written by Justice Antonin Scalia, and went beyond what the Bush administration had counseled. It said that the government may impose some restrictions on gun ownership, but that the District’s strictest-in-the-nation ban went too far under any interpretation.
Scalia wrote that the Constitution leaves the District a number of options for combating the problem of handgun violence, “including some measures regulating handguns.”
“But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” he continued. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”
The court also held unconstitutional the requirement that shotguns and rifles be kept either dissassembled or unloaded or outfitted with a triggerlock. The court called it a “prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”
Scalia was joined by the most consistently conservative justices — Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., Anthony M. Kennedy, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr.
Justice John Paul Stevens spoke from the bench to denounce the decision, which he said violated the court’s precedent that the Second Amendment refers to a right to bear arms only for military purposes.
He spoke dismissively of the court’s “newly discovered right” and said decisions about gun control should be made by legislatures.
“This court should stay out of that political thicket,” he said. Stevens was joined in dissent by the court’s most consistent liberals: David H. Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen G. Breyer.
In announcing the opinion, Scalia specifically mentioned that some restrictions on owning and carrying a gun are valid, such as denying the sale to felons or the mentally ill, or restricting the possession of guns in “sensitive places,” such as schools.
But he admitted the majority opinion was not setting standards that might be easily apparent to governments deciding how to restrict gun rights. As a result, the justice acknowledged that the ruling will probably result in more litigation.
“Since this case represents this court’s first in-depth examination of the Second Amendment, one should not expeict it to clarify the entire field,” Scalia wrote. “And there will be time enough to expound upon the historical justifications for the exceptions we have mentioned if and when those exceptions come before us.”
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee quickly put out a statement endorsing the decision, calling it a “landmark victory” for Second Amendment rights. “Today’s ruling…makes clear that other municipalities like Chicago that have banned handguns have infringed on the constitutional rights of Americans,” McCain said.
The lawyers challenging D.C.’s 32-year-old law were able to persuade the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit last year to do what no other federal appeals court had ever done: strike down a local gun-control ordinance on Second Amendment grounds.
The amendment says that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” and all but one of the circuits that had considered the issue previously had interpreted it as providing a gun-ownership right related only to military service.
But Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman, a conservative icon, wrote for a 2 to 1 panel that the amendment provides an individual right just as other provisions of the Bill of Rights do. And because handguns fall under the definition of “arms,” he wrote, the District may not ban them.
The Supreme Court’s endorsement of an individual right is a monumental change in federal jurisprudence, but perhaps not surprising. Even a small but growing group of liberal constitutional scholars — “against my political instincts,” in the words of Harvard law professor Laurence H. Tribe — have endorsed the individual-right view.
The District had received an unlikely lifeline from the Bush administration, which told the court that the amendment provides an individual right but that the appeals court erred in deciding that the District’s ban was automatically unconstitutional.
“If adopted by this court,” wrote Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, who earlier this month left his post, “such an analysis could cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation prohibiting the possession of certain firearms, including machineguns.”
The court’s last examination of the amendment was in 1939, when it ruled in U.S. v. Miller that a sawed-off shotgun transported across state lines by a bootlegger was not what the amendment’s authors had in mind when they were protecting arms needed for military service.
-The Washington Post
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