Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to examine one of the most disputed provisions of the Constitution – the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.
On Nov. 20 the justices announced they will take up an appeal involving the constitutionality of a Washington, D.C., law that bans the use or possession of all handguns.
This will be only the sixth time that the high court will rule on a case directly relating to the Second Amendment. What could make this a landmark case is that this will be the first time since 1939 that the Supreme Court will have to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right of gun ownership or whether it merely allows a collective right to keep and bear arms while serving in a state militia.
The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, will take the justices back to the founding of the republic to the speeches and writings of the Founding Fathers themselves in an effort to answer a question that has divided constitutional scholars for years.
The Second Amendment reads: “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.”
The reason this is an issue is because we can’t be sure what exactly the Founding Fathers had in mind when they wrote what they did. They didn’t just write the Constitution – they had to sell it to citizens who had just come out from under an oppressive British regime that had used armed force as a means of keeping them in line. So the writers of the Second Amendment had to balance the need for individual citizens to protect themselves with the need to avoid the potential for armed oppression by authorities.
The Supreme Court will be asked to make a ruling on what the framers of the Constitution intended when they wrote what they did.
This ruling could set the ground rules for gun-control laws across the country.
If the Court decides that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, it will limit government efforts to restrict the prevalence of guns among law-abiding citizens. Lawmakers will have to show that there is a reasonable government interest in restricting ownership of firearms, and entire categories – such as handguns – could not be banned.
If the Court decides that the right to keep and bear arms is a collective right exercised solely for the purpose of serving in a state militia, individual gun owners could not claim the protection of the Constitution against gun-control laws regulating the private use of firearms.
This case is likely to become a key issue in next year’s presidential and congressional elections. The Court will likely hand down a decision in late June, four months before we vote.
The issue in the Heller case is to what extent the Second Amendment applies to the private possession of guns in a modern American city.
Under a 1976 law, the city allows only disassembled or locked rifles and shotguns. All handguns are illegal.
The case arose after Dick Heller, a security guard, sued the city for allegedly violating his Second Amendment rights when Washington D.C. police officials refused to issue a license to allow Heller to keep a handgun in his home for protection.
Heller and a group of other city residents sued, claiming the handgun ban and other city gun restrictions are unconstitutional. A federal appeals court agreed last March because it violated what the court said was an individual right to firearms.
The city is arguing that the court’s decision “drastically departs from the mainstream of American jurisprudence,” that nine other appeals courts and the District of Columbia’s highest court have all declined to embrace an individual-rights view of the Second Amendment.
Even though they won at the appeals level, Heller’s lawyers urged the Supreme Court to take up the gun case and establish a national precedent upholding an individual’s right to keep and bear arms.
Heller’s lawyers dispute the city’s characterization of the state of the law, arguing that federal appeals courts and at least 10 state appellate courts have upheld individual gun rights.
Advocates of firearms bans are barking up the wrong tree and hopefully the court will rule in a way that will turn their attention to the real problem with guns.
There is no problem with guns, other than the very occasional situation in which one malfunctions.
When guns kill or injure, there is usually a person pulling the trigger. The problem is that people are irresponsible.
Of course, one way to curb that irresponsibility is to prohibit people from having guns. But that raises another threat, one that the Founders were intimately familiar with: Government oppression backed by military firepower.
Many Americans’ view of government has slowly shifted over the last two centuries. According to the Constitution, which was ratified by the original 13 states, the government’s role is to “establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.”
Over the intervening 200-plus years, many Americans have come to regard the government as a primary source of nearly all needs – food, clothing, housing, transportation, education, retirement, emergency aid – in addition to basic police services and military defense, which would be hard to argue against in reading the above lines from the Constitution’s Preamble.
This case will either hasten or possibly provide a small braking action to the slide toward more and more government “services” for our protection and tranquility.
The Supreme Court justices would do well, in considering this case, to remember these words, often attributed to one of the Framers of our Constitution, Thomas Jefferson: “Those who hammer their guns into plows will plow for those who do not.”