Court rules in favor of Second Amendment gun right
(Yahoo News) - The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting, the justices' first major pronouncement on gun rights in U.S. history.
The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.
The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "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."
The court's 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia's 32-year-old ban on handguns as incompatible with gun rights under the Second Amendment. The decision went further than even the Bush administration wanted, but probably leaves most firearms laws intact.
The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791. The amendment reads: "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."
posted by BP News Bureau | 11:00 AM
2 Comments:
From National Review Online:
The Supreme Court rules D.C.'s gun ban violates the Constitution. Raise your hand if you're surprised the decision was 5-4.
As I understand it, while this is good news for gun owners, there's a string or two attached that might make this not the huge victory that they wanted. Depending on how clear the ruling of the majority is, many states and localities will attempt to rewrite their gun laws in keeping with this decision. There will inevitably be disagreements about whether they are or not, and within the not-too-distant future, we'll see arguments about whether a state law allowing these kinds of guns but not those kinds, etc., violate the Heller decision. A follow-up case seeking to clarify how restrictive state and local gun laws can be will almost inevitably come down the pike in the next few years... and that case may go before a court with a very different makeup.
I expect a lot of discussion about judicial nominations on the trail in coming days, considering that four of the justices ruled that a state cannot sentence a child rapist to the death penalty, but that state can deny almost all of its citizens the right to own a gun. And when asked for his model justices, Obama listed three of those four...
From National Review Online:
It's Justice Kennedy's World; we're just living in it. Sure, we protect child-rapists and you may even run into the occasional jihadist on the courthouse steps, but — at least for now — we get to own guns to protect ourselves from them.
There's got to be a better metric of how much say we have over our own lives than what side of the bed a justice happens to get up on that day, no?
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