The Philadelphia Inquirer published an editorial on March 4th about the Supreme Court’s new Second Amendment case, McDonald v. City of Chicago, about the city’s handgun ban.
A gun-rights decision by the Supreme Court two years ago threatened to make it more dangerous to walk the streets of Washington.
Now the top court’s conservative voting bloc seems intent upon expanding the risk to other U.S. cities by dismantling strong gun-violence safeguards.
Chicago’s long-standing handgun ban came into the crosshairs of the National Rifle Association this week, as the group sought to extend the reach of the court’s earlier ruling that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights.
During arguments in the case on Tuesday, most of the justices who struck down the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban gave pretty clear signals that they believe the ruling could be applied to strike down other strict gun-control measures.
While the June 2008 ruling sent District of Columbia officials back to rewrite their gun rules, the court left some hope for big-city mayors battling gun violence by restricting the ruling to the district. More importantly, the court opined that “the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.”
Gun-control advocates rightly took the decision to mean that the Constitution does allow the enactment of reasonable limits on guns to safeguard citizens.
It was only a matter of time, though, before the NRA would seek to wield the ruling as a club against local gun-safety rules. The question now is how far the high court will let the NRA go in undoing the sensible gun-safety rules with which many communities have long been comfortable.
There is no good reason for the court to go that route, other than to press the NRA’s agenda. As Bryan Miller, head of the New Jersey anti-gun-violence group Ceasefire NJ, noted: “Chicago’s handgun ban has been in effect for 28 years. Yet suddenly the gun lobby has manufactured a court case with the intention of totally dismantling our nation’s gun laws so gun makers can sell more guns.”
If the court extends its Second Amendment ruling to jurisdictions beyond D.C., it will have embarked on a dangerous redefinition of the nation’s gun laws.
At the very least, gun laws that may be struck down in Chicago and elsewhere will take time to be rewritten to pass standards of reasonableness that the Supreme Court itself hasn’t even outlined.
That will lead to a greater proliferation of handguns – with the inevitable increase in illegal gun trafficking.
Assuming that the court is willing to overturn century-old legal precedent to apply its ruling outside the nation’s capital, it will be embarking on a social and legal experiment that’s likely to play out across the chalk outlines on many cities’ mean streets.
Given the national plague of gun violence, that’s simply the wrong course for the court.
