The 2nd Amendment: An Individual Right
Matt Welch | June 26, 2008, 10:19am
The Supreme Court rules 5-4, with Anton Scalia writing the opinion:
Answering a 127-year old constitutional question, the Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to have a gun, at least in one's home. The Court, splitting 5-4, struck down a District of Columbia ban on handgun possession.
Justice Antonin Scalia's opinion for the majority stressed that the Court was not casting doubt on long-standing bans on gun possession by felons or the mentally retarded, or laws barring guns from schools or government buildings, or laws putting conditions on gun sales.
Stay tuned all day to this space for reaction and interpretation.
Dan | June 26, 2008, 10:25am | #
"The Constitution leaves the
District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that
problem, including some measures regulating handguns,
see supra, at 54–55, and n. 26. But the enshrinement of
constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy
choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition
of handguns held and used for self-defense in the
home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment
is outmoded in a society where our standing army is
the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces
provide personal security, and where gun violence is a
serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is
not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to
pronounce the Second Amendment extinct."
John | June 26, 2008, 10:27am | #
Like most rights, the 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 Amendment
or state analogues. 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, or
laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of
arms. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those
“in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition
of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.
Pp. 54–56.
3. The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to
self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban
on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an
entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the
lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny
the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this
Cite as: 554 U. S. ____ (2008) 3
Syllabus
prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense
of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional
muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the
home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible
for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and
is hence unconstitutional. Because Heller conceded at oral argument
that the D. C. licensing law is permissible if it is not enforced arbitrarily
and capriciously, the Court assumes that a license will satisfy
his prayer for relief and does not address the licensing requirement.
Assuming he is not disqualified from exercising Second Amendment
rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and
must issue him a license to carry it in the home. Pp. 56–64.
That is t he relevant protion of the sylabus. It looks to me like they can stop you from carrying concealed, carrying into certain areas and keep you from having unusally dangerous firearms, machineguns and the like, and they can make you get a license, but that is it. Not bad really.
Dan | June 26, 2008, 11:02am | #
Breyer proposes that DC residents TAKE THE METRO (?!?) to VA or MD to shoot their guns.
"And while the District law prevents citizens from training
with handguns within the District, the District consists of only 61.4 square miles of urban area. See Dept. of
Commerce, Bureau of Census, United States: 2000 (pt. 1),
p. 11 (2002) (Table 8). The adjacent States do permit the
use of handguns for target practice, and those States are
only a brief subway ride away. See Md. Crim. Law Code
Ann. §4–203(b)(4) (Lexis Supp. 2007) (general handgun
restriction does not apply to “the wearing, carrying, or
transporting by a person of a handgun used in connection
with,” inter alia, “a target shoot, formal or informal target
practice, sport shooting event, hunting, [or] a Department
of Natural Resources-sponsored firearms and hunter
safety class”); Va. Code Ann. §18.2–287.4 (Lexis Supp.
2007) (general restriction on carrying certain loaded pistols
in certain public areas does not apply “to any person
actually engaged in lawful hunting or lawful recreational
shooting activities at an established shooting range or
shooting contest”); Washington Metropolitan Area Transit
Authority, Metrorail System Map, http://www.wmata.com/
metrorail/systemmmap.cfm.
Of course, a subway rider must buy a ticket, and the
ride takes time. It also costs money to store a pistol, say,
at a target range, outside the District. But given the costs
already associated with gun ownership and firearms
training, I cannot say that a subway ticket and a short
subway ride (and storage costs) create more than a minimal
burden."
Dan | June 26, 2008, 12:13pm | #
Pro Libertate,
No they didn't, as it wasn't an issue presented. They did reference the issue however, in their discussion of Cruikshank, an 1875 case that said that the Second Amendment only applied to Congress, and not to the States. Most notably in Footnote 23:
"With respect to Cruikshank’s continuing validity on incorporation,
a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also
said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did
not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by
our later cases. Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252,
265 (1886) and Miller v. Texas, 153 U. S. 535, 538 (1894), reaffirmed
that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government."
And they did set it up for incoproration by noting that it is a historical fundamental right (such rights are generally incorporated via the 14th Amendment:
"By the time of the founding, the right to have arms had
become fundamental for English subjects. See Malcolm
122–134. Blackstone, whose works, we have said, “constituted
the preeminent authority on English law for the
founding generation,” Alden v. Maine, 527 U. S. 706, 715
(1999), cited the arms provision of the Bill of Rights as one
of the fundamental rights of Englishmen."
