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It’s a New Legal Era For the 2nd Amendment

Whether or not a well regulated militia remains necessary to the security of a free state, as the second amendment to the U.S. Constitution declares, it isn’t the compelling motive behind the constitutional right of the people to keep and bear arms.

That, in effect, is what a 5-4 majority of the Supreme Court ruled yesterday, clearing up a constitutional ambiguity as old as the Bill of Rights and at the heart of more contemporary debates over how the U.S. should deal with the biggest epidemic of gun violence among the world’s industrial democracies. “The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. The upshot of that unambiguous assertion, and its immediate consequence, is that the District of Columbia’s handgun ban and requirement for trigger locks is unconstitutional, amounting, Justice Scalia said, “to a prohibition on an entire class of ‘arms’ that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense.” What is ambiguous is how the ruling will affect the spectrum of state and local restrictions on firearm ownership across the U.S.

Mr. Scalia said the court’s ruling “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.” But he didn’t provide guidance to lower courts and lawmakers on where the second amendment line should be drawn.

The winning legal team for the case at the high court, District of Columbia v. Heller, planned to quickly challenge local gun laws in Chicago, New York and Detroit, as the New York Times reports. Gun proponents in Texas hope the ruling will help them win the right of people with concealed-weapons licenses to carry guns where the state currently bans them, including government buildings and college campuses, the Dallas Morning News reports. In California, the National Rifle Association plans to file suit today against a San Francisco prohibition on guns in public housing, and NRA lobbyist Chris Cox tells the Los Angeles Times “there will be challenges to all sorts of statutes as we move forward.”

Many gun-control advocates yesterday voiced apprehension about the results. “More handguns will lead to more handgun violence,” Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty said, while his Chicago counterpart, Richard Daley, warned the ruling would bring a “return to the days of the Wild West,” as Legal Times reports. Among the dissenting justices, Stephen Breyer was equally pessimistic, saying “the decision threatens to throw into doubt the constitutionality of gun laws throughout the United States.” But one gun opponent, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Handgun Violence, tells The Wall Street Journal there could be a silver lining: the possibility that gun-rights advocates will feel less threatened and be more open to compromise.

The decision drew a lot attention in fellow democracies overseas that take more restrictive views of gun rights. The Times of London asked the liberal American constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe if the U.S. should try to learn from England and Wales, where only 50 people were killed in gun crimes in 2005, compared with 12,352 in the U.S. He replied: “We come from a much more violent culture, one in which it would be much more difficult to enact and enforce a complete ban. Whatever the law, we’re not going to become England.”

By JOSEPH SCHUMAN