Today, March 18, 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in District of Columbia v. Heller. The Court announced its decision to take the case in which plaintiffs challenge the constitutionality of the District’s gun ban last Fall. The District of Columbia appealed a lower court’s ruling last year affirming that the Second Amendment of the Constitution protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, and that the District’s bans on handguns, carrying firearms within the home, and possession of loaded or operable firearms for self-defense violate that right.
In March, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit held that “[T]he phrase ‘the right of the people,’ when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual.” The D.C. Circuit also rejected the claim that the Second Amendment does not apply to the District of Columbia because D.C. is not a state.
The case marks the first time a Second Amendment challenge to a firearm law has reached the Supreme Court since 1939.
The question presented is whether the following provisions — D.C. Code §§ 7-2502.02(a)(4), 22-4504(a), and 7-2507.02 — violate the Second Amendment rights of individuals who are not affiliated with any state-regulated militia, but who wish to keep handguns and other firearms for private use in their homes.
Over a century ago, this Court declared it “perfectly well settled” that the Bill of Rights was “not intended to lay down any novel principles of government, but simply to embody certain guaranties and immunities which we had inherited from our English ancestors.”
The operative clause of the Second Amendment is as unambiguous as any command of the First
Amendment. Read in light of its preamble, it is meant to guarantee the existence of an armed citizenry, the militia infrastructure from which the Republic could obtain (and would be more likely to create) a well-regulated militia.
According to its text, context, and historic setting, the Second Amendment protects an individual right to private possession and use of handguns in one’s own home. The individual right to keep and bear arms is essential to a “well regulated militia” – a self-bodying, self-governing association of people privately trained to arms, modeled after the colonial militia that took up their privately-owned firearms to defeat a tyrannical effort to confiscate their arms. In turn, a “well regulated militia” ensures the preservation of a “free state” by allowing all members of the American polity to exercise, if necessary, the sovereign right of the “people” to reconstitute their government.
In order to ensure its purpose to preserve the people’s liberties, the Second Amendment bans discriminatory legislation against classes of persons that, by nature, are rightful members of the “people.” In order to ensure its means to defeat tyranny, the Second Amendment bans discriminatory legislation against firearms that are essential to a preserve those liberties. By discriminating against law-abiding D.C. citizens and against handguns, the D.C. Code provisions violate both of these standards and, therefore, unconstitutionally infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
And just so you fully understand the concept, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting or sport shooting – it’s all about the right of self-defense.
Supreme Court, Heller, Second Amendment, keep and bear arms, handgun, firearm
