Supreme Court to Rule on 2nd Amendment

Just before this issue went to press, the U. S. Supreme Court announced its decision to take up the case of the District of Columbia v. Heller. As you may already know, the plaintiffs in this case have challenged the ban on guns in the nation’s capital. Earlier last year, a lower court ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, affirming that the Second Amendment of the U. S.

Constitution protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, and that the District’s ban on handguns, firearms in the home, and possession of loaded or operable firearms for self-defense violates that right. The District of Columbia has appealed to the U. S. Supreme Court, which will begin hearing oral arguments sometime in early 2008. If you’re not a citizen of the District of Columbia, you might think the outcome of the case is unimportant, but this case has possible ramifications for all U. S. citizens.

That’s because the anti-gunners, led in this case by the mayor of Washington, D. C., Adrian M. Fenty, are arguing that the Second Amendment grants a right to the states (to maintain a militia), but does not grant a right to the individual (to keep and bear arms). Last March, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in striking down the District’s gun ban, held in the case of Parker v. D.

C. that "The phrase "the right of the people"…leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual." This was the second time in recent history that a federal circuit court upheld the longstanding belief that the Second Amendment was an individual right. In 2001, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in the case of U. S. v.

Emerson that "All of the evidence indicates that the Second Amendment, like other parts of the Bill of Rights, applies to and protects individual Americans. st time a Secondsince 1939. The on by the Supreme Court to rule definitively on whether the Second Amendment of the Constitution provides an individual right to keep and bear arms. "The firearms industry looks forward to the Supreme Court putting to rest the specious argument that the Second Amendment is not an individual right, said Lawrence G.

Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel. eller case will be the first time since has addressed the Second Amendme legal scholars and constitutional experts are on record as having concluded that the Second Amendment provides an individual right.

Such renowned scholars as Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, William Van Alstyne of Duke, and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas have all been vocal in their assertion that the Second Amendment secures an individual right to keep and bear arms. It’s ludicrous, of course, to argue that nine of the 10 amendments that make up the Bill of Rights refer to the individual, but one’t he Second Amendment’applies to the states. But ludicrous arguments are not unknown in the U. S. court system.

Nor are ludicrous rulings from the bench. Ergo, this one bears watching by us all. Editor Keith Lawrence Technical