Supreme Court says Americans have right to guns

By MARK SHERMAN, Associated Press Writer

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense in their homes, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.

The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms restrictions intact.

The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The 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 basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual's right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.

Writing for the majority, Justice Antonin Scalia said that an individual right to bear arms is supported by "the historical narrative" both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit "the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home," Scalia said. The court also struck down Washington's requirement that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but left intact the licensing of guns.

Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans' preferred weapon of self-defense in part because "it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority "would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons."

He said such evidence "is nowhere to be found."

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."

Joining Scalia were Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas. The other dissenters were Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter.

Gun rights supporters hailed the decision. "I consider this the opening salvo in a step-by-step process of providing relief for law-abiding Americans everywhere that have been deprived of this freedom," said Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association.

The NRA will file lawsuits in San Francisco, Chicago and several of its suburbs challenging handgun restrictions there based on Thursday's outcome.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., a leading gun control advocate in Congress, criticized the ruling. "I believe the people of this great country will be less safe because of it," she said.

The capital's gun law was among the nation's strictest.

Dick Anthony Heller, 66, an armed security guard, sued the District after it rejected his application to keep a handgun at his home for protection in the same Capitol Hill neighborhood as the court.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled in Heller's favor and struck down Washington's handgun ban, saying the Constitution guarantees Americans the right to own guns and that a total prohibition on handguns is not compatible with that right.

The issue caused a split within the Bush administration. Vice President Dick Cheney supported the appeals court ruling, but others in the administration feared it could lead to the undoing of other gun regulations, including a federal law restricting sales of machine guns. Other laws keep felons from buying guns and provide for an instant background check.

White House reaction was restrained. "We're pleased that the Supreme Court affirmed that the Second Amendment protects the right of Americans to keep and bear arms," White House spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Scalia said nothing in Thursday's ruling should "cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings."

In a concluding paragraph to the his 64-page opinion, Scalia said the justices in the majority "are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country" and believe the Constitution "leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns."

The law adopted by Washington's city council in 1976 bars residents from owning handguns unless they had one before the law took effect. Shotguns and rifles may be kept in homes, if they are registered, kept unloaded and either disassembled or equipped with trigger locks.

Opponents of the law have said it prevents residents from defending themselves. The Washington government says no one would be prosecuted for a gun law violation in cases of self-defense.

The last Supreme Court ruling on the topic came in 1939 in U.S. v. Miller, which involved a sawed-off shotgun. Constitutional scholars disagree over what that case means but agree it did not squarely answer the question of individual versus collective rights.

Forty-four state constitutions contain some form of gun rights, which are not affected by the court's consideration of Washington's restrictions.

The case is District of Columbia v. Heller, 07-290.

Machiavelli Was Right

by Charley Reese

Niccolò Machiavelli, who was a sort of Karl Rove of his day, though with more integrity, said of the Swiss that they were "the most free and most armed people" of Europe. Get it? The connection between arms and freedom?

That statement is still true of the Swiss. Many people know that they practice neutrality, but not many know that they practice armed neutrality. If the gun controllers' claim that the mere presence of arms leads to mayhem were true, the Swiss would have wiped themselves out years ago. There are guns and gun ranges all over the place. You would be hard-pressed to find a Swiss home without a firearm and ammunition. Yet, the Swiss have a very low crime rate.

If you were a robber or a rapist, who would you rather have as a victim? Someone who is armed, or someone who is defenseless? Even a stupid criminal knows the answer to that question.

If the police can protect us – which is another claim the gun-control people make – then why are so many people murdered, raped and robbed? Even the television fictional stories tell you the answer to that. The cops get there after the crime has been committed. Otherwise, there wouldn't be a crime scene. Nearly all the cop shows open with the police looking at a dead, unarmed body.

Do you really believe that the men who had just fought a long and bloody war against the British and were writing what we call the Bill of Rights had this conversation:

"Well, let's see. We've guaranteed freedom of assembly, of religion, of speech and of the press. Oh, my gosh, we've forgotten the duck hunters. They'll raise heck if we leave them out, so we'd better write an amendment for them."

The Second Amendment has nothing whatsoever to do with hunting. It states: "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 men who wrote these amendments were pretty darn fluent in English. If they had intended the right to keep and bear arms to apply only to the militia, they would have said so. They would have written "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the states to arm their respective militias shall not be infringed."

They didn't say that. The main sentence says "right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." "People" means everybody, not just the members of the militia. The subordinate clause, "A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state," just gives one, but not the only, reason why all the people have a right to keep and bear arms. The militia, after all, was drawn from the people. It was not the Army. The first meaning of "bear," by the way, is to carry, bring or take. Americans have the right to keep arms and to carry them.

The word "regulate" in those days meant trained, and do you notice again the connection between arms and freedom? The subordinate clause refers to a "free state." Obviously, an unfree state would not allow the people to be armed.

The Founding Fathers were not urban neurotics like so many of today's politicians. They were almost all outdoor people. Guns were to them just tools, like their axes or plows. You couldn't survive in the wilderness without firearms, and at the time of our Revolution, there were only about 3 million people from Maine to Georgia.

Nor were there any police forces. There was no Secret Service, FBI or any of the other alphabet law-enforcement agencies. If you decided to travel, you traveled at your own risk, and you can bet people traveled armed. When I was last at Williamsburg, Va., they had a room in one of the historical houses arranged as if a traveler had just arrived and unpacked. There on top of a dresser was a pistol.

The Gun Thing

by Tricia Shore

The well-educated, homeschooling, breastfeeding mom at one of the Southern California homeschool park days that we attend, has summed me up as a libertarian. I use the small "l" variety only because I’ve yet to register as an actual Libertarian: "I like what I’ve read about Libertarians," she told me, "but I have a problem with the gun thing."

Uh-oh.

"The gun thing" is something that I thought I understood until I met my capital "l" Libertarian husband over ten years ago. "Guns protect us from the government," he told me, which I thought at the time was a statement made only by anti-government freakish types. I now respect such supposed freakish types much more than I used to. In any case, I thought he was really nice and that he’d make a great father. Three children later, I still think he makes a great dad and I’m even more fond of him these days, but my ideas on the gun thing have changed.

I grew up in rural North Carolina, close to the mountains, where almost everybody hunts. Indeed, everybody has a gun. When supposed gun safety advocates tell us that our guns should be behind twelve or fourteen locks and placed in a high corner that is only accessible by ladder, I smile. Gun safety at the house I grew up in consisted of saying, "That gun can kill you; don’t touch it." Those eight words were all I really needed. As much as life sometimes got me down, I really liked living. I still do. As a child, I wanted to grow up. I wanted to have my own children. A gun could put a stop to that. So, I never touched it, and it stayed in its place, leaning against a closet wall in the utility room.

That was pretty much it as far as gun safety went.

When I went to college, I learned that politically correct people don’t like guns. I learned that guns were awful and evil and that I’d grown up in some kind of abusive home, supposedly, because our shotgun wasn’t behind all those locks.

During my last semester of graduate school, I met the man who would become the father of my children. But there was the gun thing that I had to just accept about him. I didn’t understand what he meant about all this guns-protecting-us-from-the-government stuff. Guns were for hunting, I reasoned, and if you have a license for a gun, then you should be happy, right? We didn’t talk much about the gun thing for a while.

Our first son was not quite a year old when the September 11th tragedy occurred. While nursing his younger brother a couple of years later, I began to read on the Internet. I read about freedoms that I had thought I’d always have. I read about the loss of those freedoms, especially after September 11, 2001. I thought about how free we were, even as high school students, to make mistakes, to ride around town, to go through high school without signing a paper that says I have to agree to a random drug test if I want to participate in extracurricular activities.

Only a couple of decades later, a friend’s daughter, who goes to a high school close to the one that my friend and I attended, must sign a paper saying that she’ll agree to a random drug test. The closest town to where we grew up in North Carolina has banned cruising and signs tell you that you can now receive a ticket if you drive through town more than once; I noticed a similar sign near the ever-communist West Hollywood the other day. There is now zero tolerance for mistakes.

Things have definitely changed since I was in high school; freedoms are being lost faster than Confederate flags are being banned. People watch television and don’t put up too much of a fight about these freedoms.

But what about guns? As I read more, I saw that Ruby Ridge, Waco, and other such tragedies, including the recent one in which several children were taken from their parents in Texas, are all about government control over people. The mainstream media make the victims of these things look crazy, and sometimes that’s not hard to do, but the reality is that they are people who want to do their own thing while doing no harm to others. Why should the government care?

The more I began to read, the more sense that guns made to me. Would I have to worry, for instance, about a Virginia Tech shooting scenario happening if I carried a gun? If someone came in a classroom with a gun and all the students were armed, how many students would a lone gunman be able to kill before he was killed? Could we not have avoided the campus lockdown thing and many deaths if guns had been encouraged on campus?

Besides the gun thing, there is the other-parts-of-the-Constitution thing. I’m beginning to understand now that many people are not into the Constitution these days; it’s become somewhat passé in our current police state. Another homeschooling mom that I was talking to earlier this week seemed to think that I had a novel idea in citing the Fourth Amendment if a social wrecker comes to my door, asking to come in without a search warrant. Ah, the Constitution is great, when people remember it and apply it in their lives.

Here’s what that wonderful document that men shed blood to write says about guns:

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.

This kind of writing makes the gun permit that many of my friends and family in North Carolina hold so sacred seem silly. Why does anyone need a permit when the right to have a gun should not be infringed? Guns are powerful tools that allow us to defend ourselves and our families. Imagine how those who were alive during biblical times would have loved to have that kind of technology.

I currently live in California, where even those who value the freedom of homeschooling often fail to value the freedom of having a gun. Or twelve. Or a hundred. All owned sans government control. Such a scenario scares far too many folks. Many people in the Southern end of the Golden State believe that guns cause problems and that the world will be a much better place when only government-deemed police officers are able to legally obtain guns. Most people don’t think, although it could easily happen, that if the police break into your house in the middle of the night, a gun might protect you from them. Many people fail to see that if you’re at a traffic light and someone carjacks you and your children, a gun might scare the would-be-thief away much more easily than a scared and desperate call to a 9-1-1 dispatcher. Maybe the problem is that not many people think much about guns anymore; we simply accept what the government and mainstream media tell us.

What will happen to us as a society when we’re completely unarmed and the only armed folks are police officers who have been well-trained by federal officials – as most police officers are these days – the federal officials who, ignoring California state law, for instance, come in and close down perfectly legal and thriving marijuana dispensaries? What will happen when federally-trained police officers, many of whom have been trained to kill in the unconstitutionally declared Iraq war, come to your door demanding your children, as officers did recently in Texas? Do guns look so terrible, so ominous, when these things occur? Does defending ourselves against an out-of-control government seem silly when that government is threatening your family?


Photo Credit: Mr. Comic Mom

Turns out, my husband was right about the gun thing. Although many people have a hard time understanding this idea, government works much better when we are armed, the way that our Founding Fathers intended it. An armed citizenry allows government to truly be by the people: Think about how much the government does what you want; then think about how many people walk around unarmed these days. The fewer armed citizens there are, the more powerful the government.

May 2, 2008

Tricia Shore [send her mail], Comic Mom, is the breastfeeding, homeschooling, thinking mama of three sons and the wife of their dad, Mr. Comic Mom. Currently living in Los Angeles, where she has recently become hip enough to be on MySpace, she misses the sweet tea and barbecue of North Carolina.

Copyright © 2008 LewRockwell.com

Supreme Court Confronts ‘Right to Bear Arms’ in Case

March 29, 2008
Stephen P. Halbrook
North County Times

“That would be an odd ‘right of the people’ if limited to militias,” commented Chief Justice John Roberts in the Supreme Court hearing March 18 in District of Columbia v. Heller.

The case concerns whether the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns violates the Second Amendment guarantee that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Referring to the American Revolution, Justice Antonin Scalia noted that “tyrants took away the people’s weapons, not just those of the militia.”

For the American settlers, Justice Anthony Kennedy added, “Wasn’t there a need for self defense against Indian attacks, robbers, wolves and grizzlies?”

In recent years, Kennedy is the swing vote in close cases.

The founders were not concerned with personal protection, insisted Walter Dellinger—solicitor general during the Clinton Administration, and now arguing for D.C.—but only with “bearing arms” in the militia.

“Does the amendment have any effect today?” queried Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

“Only if a federal law restrained state militias,” Dellinger responded.

So this “right of the people” has shriveled into a meaningless gesture exercised only by permission of the government. But the “exclusively militia” interpretation is only a facade. Those who deny this right of the people would be equally opposed to a robust state militia system in conflict with federal authority.

The text of the Constitution already had a militia clause. As Kennedy noted, the preamble to the Second Amendment—“a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state”—supplemented that clause. “My view is that the amendment guarantees a general right to bear arms without reference to the militia.”

And Scalia added that historically, English bans had been imposed on possession of arms by oppressed groups, such as Roman Catholics and Scottish Highlanders.

Which “arms” are constitutionally protected? One test is whether the arms are of a type “commonly possessed” by the people.

Dellinger tried to scare the court away from sanctioning handguns under this test, on the basis that it would also sanction machine guns, of which more than 100,000 are registered with the feds. Not an impressive number, given our population of 300 million.

Solicitor General Paul Clement argued, on behalf of the United States, that the right is individual, but that the court should not decide whether the D.C. ban is unconstitutional.

This “just don’t know” attitude may be explained by fears that the Justice Department’s prosecutions of citizens under this very ban for 30 years might be reopened.

Clement also worried that voiding the ban would question restrictions on machine guns and armor-piercing ammo, but Chief Justice Roberts reminded him that the only issue is handguns.

Justice David Souter found “keep and bear” to be a unitary concept “what is served by bear, if you can keep?” He quipped that “you do not bear arms to hunt; no one in the 18th century talked that way.”

“Keeping” refers to possession in the home, Clement responded, and “bearing,” to carry.

Jefferson sponsored legislation specifically referring to “bearing a gun” while hunting.

Alan Gura presented the case for Dick Heller, the court security guard who lives in Washington, D.C. and protects judges with a handgun by day, but is not trusted with having one when he goes home.

Justice Stephen Breyer queried how handguns had a militia purpose, and why was it not reasonable to ban them, given the high murder rate?

“The handgun ban,” Gura responded, “weakens military preparedness.”

Some seemed ready to scrap a militia arms test. “The second clause of the Second Amendment,” insisted Scalia, “goes beyond the militia—it is a right of the people. Why not acknowledge that?”

Kennedy stated that a machine gun is more related to the militia than the handgun, but the latter is relevant to the homeowner.

Stevens asserted that “only” two of the original states, Pennsylvania and Vermont, had arms guarantees referring to self-defense, and “all the others were for common defense.”

Yet only two other states—North Carolina and Massachusetts—had an arms guarantee, and both accorded the right to “the people,” even though they referred to common defense purposes. As Gura pointed out, those provisions were interpreted to recognize self-defense.

As is usual, the justices engaged in their own fencing match.

“Look at the murder rate, the crime statistics,” anguished Souter.

“All the more reason to allow homeowners to have handguns,” implored Scalia.

Long guns, even though they must be trigger-locked and unloaded, would do fine for home defense, Dellinger insisted as the last word. He could remove the lock in three seconds, albeit in daylight.

“And how long if you’re awakened at 3 a.m. and you reach for the lamp and your reading glasses?” Scalia asked, to general laughter.

Justice Clarence Thomas asked no questions. But a decade ago, in Printz v. U.S., he wrote an opinion appearing to favor the individual-rights view.

Looks like the Supreme Court is finally ready to recognize the Second Amendment as a real part of the Bill of Rights, and that D.C.’s ban is in big trouble.

Justices take up gun rights in D.C. case

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court gets to write on a blank slate when it takes up the meaning of the Second Amendment "right to keep and bear arms" and the District of Columbia's ban on handguns.

The nine justices have said almost nothing about gun rights, and their predecessors have likewise given no definitive answer to whether the Constitution protects an individual's right to own guns or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia.

The case that will be argued Tuesday is among the most closely watched of the term, drawing 68 briefs from outside groups. Most of those support an individual's right to own a gun.

"This may be one of the only cases in our lifetime when the Supreme Court is going to interpret an important provision of our Constitution unencumbered by precedent," said Georgetown University law professor Randy Barnett.