In what is expected to be a decision that will have significant political impact in an election year, the Supreme Court announced on November 20th that it would hear an appeal by the District of Columbia to the striking down of its ban on handguns.
The announcement represents the potential, given that there are four Federalist Society pro-NRA justices on the Court (Alito, Scalia, Roberts, and Thomas), that for the first time in United States history the Supreme Court may declare an individual – as distinct from collective right – to own firearms.
Lost in the legal arguments, as GunGuys has pointed out on numerous occasions, is the reality that even a ban on handguns does not restrict the right of a person to own other firearms. A resident in D.C. can own shotguns and rifles, for instance.
The NRA has been successful in equating the regulation of specific types of weapons and the commerce in those weapons as relating to a mythic all-embracing fantasy about the Second Amendment.
Clearly, if laser guns that could kill someone from a thousand yards away were to come on the market (and they will), it would not be in the interest of protecting our law enforcement officials and citizens to allow such firearms to be sold to civilians. So, there is no absolute right to manufacture, sell and own any type of gun that the NRA and the gun industry claims to be a firearm protected under the Second Amendment. That is a dangerous and legally unsound notion, given that the courts have allowed gun control in the United States for as long as the laws have been in existence.
However, given the political and right wing shift in the Supreme Court, it may come down to Justice Kennedy to cast the deciding vote on gun sanity and the original intent of the Second Amendment, which guaranteed a collective right – and in no circumstances an unlimited right to own any type of weapon that anyone labeled a firearm, no matter what the risk to society.
Of course, the Supreme Court could write a “narrow†opinion that would leave most gun control intact, but prohibit bans on basically any weapon the NRA labels a gun.
It should be noted that within the gun control movement there was vigorous debate about whether or not to appeal the D.C. ruling. This is because, as it stands now, the striking down of the D.C. law is only applicable within the D.C. circuit.
The decision that the Supreme Court will render will affect the entire country – and it may be that there is a desire to stir up a political hornet’s nest on the issue during an election year, hoping that it will favor the Republicans.
Of course, all of this is conjecture.
