Friday editorial: Up in arms
Two hundred and seventeen years after the Second Amendment was ratified, the United States Supreme Court has decided what it means. To bear arms, it turns out, you don’t have to belong to a militia after all. In most places, it’s been that way all along.
On Thursday, a slender 5-4 majority of the Court made it official, ruling that the Constitution empowers individuals to own and carry weapons.
The ruling is being cheered by gun rights advocates, but the closer they read the decision, the more they may realize that the court employed small- caliber ammunition.
Landmark status notwithstanding, the decision has very little pop. Its immediate impact will be felt in the relatively few jurisdictions that have enacted statutes or ordinances prohibiting individuals from owning guns.
At issue in the case, District of Columbia et al. v. Heller, was the familiar ambiguous language of the Second Amendment: “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 U.S. Supreme Court never had ruled squarely on what the Constitution’s framers meant by this. “For most of our history,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority in Heller, “the question did not present itself.”
Conventional wisdom, never seriously challenged, had been that the language did not empower individuals to own or carry guns as they see fit. Rather, a literal reading seemed to state that the right was collective, intended to prevent the national government from interfering with the states’ ability to organize militias.
Then came the case of District of Columbia v. Heller, in which Dick Anthony Heller, a security guard, challenged what was recognized widely as the toughest gun laws in the nation: Residents of the District of Columbia could not own a handgun or keep any kind of weapon in their homes unless it was disassembled and rendered inoperable. Only residents holding special permits could keep an operable firearm in their homes.
Mr. Heller sought such a permit for the pistol he carries on his job. He was turned down and filed a lawsuit challenging the law as an infringement of his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. An appeals court ruled in his favor. On Thursday, the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc of four, joined by Justice Anthony Kennedy, agreed.
It ruled that citizens actually had a right to keep and bear arms long before the Constitution’s Bill of Rights was ratified. The purpose of the Second Amendment was to ensure that that right was not “infringed.” The language about “militias,” Mr. Scalia’s opinion explained, neither expands nor limits this right; it merely sets forth the reason for protecting against an infringement: keeping the national government from eliminating militias.
The majority opinion put special emphasis on the historic right to keep a gun to protect “hearth and home.” Any risks that this entails — including thefts and accidental shootings, especially those involving children — are assumed by the individual gun owner.
But the majority took pains to explain what the ruling does not change: “Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on 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 or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms,” Justice Scalia wrote.
The majority also noted that the state has the ability to enact laws regulating the storage of firearms to prevent accidents. It also made plain that the right does not extend to “dangerous and unusual weapons,” specifically citing the military’s M-16 rifle.
In short, the court said, the Second Amendment means you can have a handgun or a shotgun at home but not necessarily a rocket-propelled grenade launcher or an AK-47. In most jurisdictions of the United States, this comes very close to the status quo. As such, it probably will not satisfy absolutists on either side of the gun issue.
(Pictured: A military flint lock rifle, made in 1779 and used in the American Revolutionary war, is part of the collection of Dr Harvey Veit. WAYNE CROSSLIN / POST-DISPATCH)
Poor Post-Dispatch, trying to make lemonade out of the lemons the Court handed them today. Gun owners understand the agenda of the gun banners: using restrictions on the Constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens to disarm their ideological opponents.
Perhaps even more important than the Heller decision is the fact that this decision reminds all Americans who love their freedom that elections matter. Do the people of the United States want a President who appoints Supreme Court justices who respect the Constitution, or one who contributes to judicial tyranny by appointing those who wish to bend our sovereign document to their own political agenda?
The frightening aspect about this case and others recently is the power of one swing voter on the Supreme Court, an elite group of essentially political appointees, often only grudgingly ratified by the political opposition. In effect, Justice Kennedy, like Sandra Day O’Conner before him, has more power than even the President on controversial issues that are referred to the court. Justice was served in this case, but opposing groups have already planned end runs around the court’s landmark decision.
The weakness and vulnerability of the court decision is made clear by their waffling on military-type firearms, specifically the M-16. People familiar with this weapon, including our combat forces and competitive target shooters, know that it’s inferior in some ways to the M-14, the WW2 vintage M-1, and the AK-47. The AK-47, in turn, is ballistically similar to or inferior to the .30-30 carbine from the 1800’s. Weapons capable of fully automatic fire haven’t been permitted for general use since 1934, so when an M-16 or an AK-47 shows up in a dealer’s rack or at a firing range, it has already been modified for semi-automatic fire only. Gun-haters know all this but will never mention it, because it blows their case.
Citizens who value their freedom must continue to make their voices heard, and louder than ever. My NRA membership is good until 5/31/09, but a form to extend it will go in tomorrow’s mail.
In it’s simplest form, when the good guys outgun the bad guys, violent crime goes down.
The liberals are not required to own weapons by the SCOTUS ruling, so they should be happy. The libs can depend on honest citizens with firearms to defend them. The SCOTUS long ago ruled that the police have no obligation of any kind to proteact individuals from any law breakers.
The NRA has not, and never will advocate to permit criminals and the truly mentally ill to own firearms. Indeed, no organization has more strongly supported serious criminal penalties for the criminal use of firearms. So you see, despite the Post’s belittling of it, this ruling could not have been improved if the NRA itself had written it.
You call the now discredited collective right view the “conventional wisdom” which was “never seriously challenged.” This reeks of the Manhattan woman who said, “I don’t know how Nixon won, I don’t know anyone who voted for him.” In fact, across America, a solid majority believes that gun ownership is indeed an individual right bestowed by the constitution. And in fact, the collective right view has been seriously challenged for years, with this court case being the successful culmination of those challenges.
As to your condescending statement that it was “a slender 5-4 majority of the Court” … well, SCOTUS rulings are like Super Bowl games - you get the ring whether you win by a point, or 70 to nothing.
The point of the editorial is that the practical consequences of the Supreme Court decision appear to be very small.
The most restrictive part of the by far the most restrictive gun law in the nation was voided. Beyond that, the only part of the right to bear arms held sacrosanct was the ability to possess and carry a gun in one’s home.
Meanwhile, the Supreme Court majority said legislative bodies have broad power to regulate gun sales and ownership and to impose gun safety requirements.
Does anyone read the opinion differently.
Is this a disappointing result for gun advocates — or is this limited protection how they interpret the 2nd Amendment too?
Mr. Roth,
I do find the ruling troubling on the most basic level of protection. Today, the militias of the several states are essentially an adjunct of the national military. Recall the men who signed the constitution had recently concluded a revolutionary war and were about to embark upon another war with Britain, A large reason for the victory in those wars was access to superior weapons, not by the nation or the indiviuals states, but by individual citizens.
Now I do not expect Senator Obama or Senator McCain to usher in the outright genocide Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao etc. did when they took over the governing of their countries, however, what safeguard do we have against those types of aggressors? You might cite the many we have written in the constitution, but the freedom we ought to enjoy, in the ultimate scenario, must be preserved, by force if necessary by the individual citizens of our nation. But what if the oppressor limits our ownership of the very force need to preserve freedom. I would cite to you the case of Native Americans who were prohibited from gun ownership and subsequently massacred and robbed of their lands.
220 years since the constitution was written, you may think there is no real threat to your life, liberty and property, but many of those nations which were destroyed by the British, French, and Spanish and later the Soviets and Chinese had lasted much longer than our nation.
It has taken over 200 years for the Supreme Court to acknowledge the right of our citizens to defend themselves, and by a split decision, but that’s better than England, which has essentially outlawed self-defense. Nearly all guns there are illegal except what the Brits fondly call a “two-two”, and using even that against an armed attacker breaking into their home can land them in prison and subject them to lawsuits with the presumption of guilt. It’s even illegal to possess or transfer a double-edged knife with a 3-inch blade.
Few knowledgeable and law-abiding firearms owners are “gun-advocates”. We don’t want guns in the hands of potentially violent felons or mental cases. We want guns for hunting, target shooting, collecting, and self-protection. I have almost never loaded or carried a gun for defense.
The many millions of lawful gun-owners in America had better be very watchful and pro-active, because their sworn enemies have no intention of backing off from the attack. In the words of Senator Feinstein of California: “…Mr. and Mrs. America, turn them all in.”
Is this a disappointing result for gun advocates — or is this limited protection how they interpret the 2nd Amendment too?
— Eddie Roth
Mr. Roth, this gun advocate is neither excited nor disappointed by this result. I interpret the second amendment exactly as you interpret the first amendment; as a basic human freedom. The “limited protection” is a result of the scope of the case and the Washington D.C. law being challenged. Those suffering anti-gun bias who attempt to demonize gun owners and the NRA may be well intentioned, but are drastically wrong. I subscribe to the letter of the NRA platform and take pride in over three decades of membership. The NRA has never advocated gun rights for felons or the mentally ill. The NRA has done much more to advance the cause of gun safety and crime prevention and punishment than all the anti-gun groups combined. Gun injuries to humans are a result of negligent or criminal behaviors. If the anti-gunners would follow the NRA lead (www.nraila.org/issues) and address the behavior instead of the instrument we would all benefit.
Mr. Roth - While the scope of this ruling is narrow, as is the scope of nearly every court ruling, the implications of it could not be more significant. The chief legal argument of gun control advocates has always been that there is no individual constitutional right. With this ruling, that argument no longer carries water. Gun control advocates will now be forced to fight on the NRA’s turf, a legal landscape where individual rights are presumed, and where restrictions must be justified against this constitutional foundation.
What a coincidence that the same day of this ruling, the PD had a story about the state’s prison population falling. I wonder if there is a correlation?
I have heard it said that if Hitler hadn’t taken away people’s guns, there may never have been a holocaust. Makes you wonder doesn’t it?
I think you anti-gun people need to review your history of fascism and communism and you may think differently about taking people’s guns away and their right to defend themselves.