The U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., last week stunned many observers with a ruling overturning the city's decades-old law ban on private handgun ownership - often cited as the nation's strictest gun-control law.
“In overturning the District of Columbia's long-standing ban on handguns Friday,” the Washington Post intoned, “a federal appeals court turned its back on nearly 70 years of Supreme Court precedent Š”
In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of appellate judges ruled that D.C.'s 1976 ban on handguns in private homes violates people's Second Amendment rights to bear arms. So does another provision of D.C.'s gun law requiring rifles and shotguns be stored disassembled and with trigger locks.
Two schools of thought battle over the meaning of the Second Amendment, which says, “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.” One school holds that this is a “collective” right, meaning that the public as a whole, vis-a-vis the well-regulated militia, has the right to bear arms. The other school holds that it's an individual right - that each person has the right to own firearms.
The Second Amendment has to be the most ambiguously worded of the amendments, which makes it easy to interpret it however one sees fit. Historical records and context, however, support the idea of individual rights.
What about all that Supreme Court precedent the Washington Post talked about? Some precedent!
The most authoritative conclusion anyone can make based on U.S. Supreme Court rulings on the Second Amendment is that the Supreme Court is decidedly gun-shy. The Second Amendment may be one of the most controversial parts of the Bill of Rights, but it's also among the least-adjudicated by the nation's highest court.
The only significant Second Amendment opinion from the Supreme Court over the past century was a 1939 case called United States v. Miller. In its opinion, a unanimous court upheld the constitutionality of a 1934 law requiring registration of sawed-off shotguns. On the surface, this seemed to bolster the “collective” right camp, since the court noted that a sawed-off shotgun served no purpose for a militia. Read more closely, however, and you see the court essentially saying that the government would not be allowed to restrict ownership of firearms that did have military use.
That may be the most significant Second Amendment opinion, but it's not much of a landmark to use in navigating complicated social and legal matters.
The D.C. appeals court comes at the issue head-on. That's more useful. Its finding of an individual right coincides with the prevailing view among legal scholars at least one other appellate court. It also happens to be an interpretation of the Second Amendment we like and believe best serves democracy.
It's possible that this ruling may force the Supreme Court to revisit the nature of Second Amendment rights, at long last. Don't count on it, though. The high court's clearest precedent has been to avoid the issue.
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