Supreme Court asserts broad gun rights

“Until today, it has been understood that legislatures may regulate the civilian use and misuse of firearms so long as they do not interfere with the preservation of a well-regulated militia,” he said. “The Court’s announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes upsets that settled understanding.”

Stevens added, “I fear that the District’s policy choice may well be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table.”

Thursday’s decision stems from a lawsuit filed by Dick Anthony Heller, a security guard who lives in Washington, D.C. Mr. Heller wanted to keep a handgun in his home for protection, but the city government refused to issue a permit, citing its strict gun control laws.

Heller sued, charging that the handgun ban and other measures violated his Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.

A federal judge threw the case out, ruling that since Heller was not a member of a militia he had no constitutional right to firearms. But that decision was reversed 2-1 by a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. The appeals court found that the right to arms established in the Second Amendment is broader than a direct link to a militia.

In appealing to the Supreme Court, lawyers for the city argued that the Second Amendment protects only militia-related firearms rights, not the personal use and possession of firearms. The city’s lawyers said the first clause of the amendment limits the scope of the entire amendment.

Lawyers for Heller characterized the amendment’s first clause as merely a preamble to what they said was the rights-securing language in the second clause.

In Thursday’s decision, the majority justices agreed with Heller’s reading. “Does the preface fit with an operative clause that creates an individual right to keep and bear arms?” Scalia asked in his opinion. “It fits perfectly, once one knows the history that the founding generation knew,” he said.

“That history showed that the way tyrants had eliminated a militia consisting of all the able-bodied men was not by banning the militia but simply by taking away the people’s arms,” he wrote.

In his opinion, Scalia, himself an accomplished hunter, attempted to tackle what will probably emerge as a key debate point among some gun rights advocates.

“It may be objected that if weapons that are most useful in military service – M-16 rifles and the like – may be banned, then the Second Amendment right is completely detached from the prefatory clause,” he wrote. “But as we said, the conception of the militia at the time of the Second Amendment’s ratification was the body of all citizens capable of military service, who would bring the sorts of lawful weapons that they possessed at home to militia duty.”

In effect, the high court is saying there is no constitutional right to the private possession of modern, military-grade weapons. “It may be true that no amount of small arms could be useful against modern-day bombers and tanks,” Scalia wrote. “But the fact that modern developments have limited the degree of fit between the prefatory clause and the protected right cannot change our interpretation of the right.”

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