The Supreme Court ruled today in District of Columbia v. Heller that DC’s banning of guns in the home and requirements that all guns must be unloaded/disassembled or trigger locked except for those at a business is unconstitutional. In so doing, the 5-4 majority said that it found the Second Amendment to be not just about militias, but about an individual right of self-defense.
Remember that, btw, the next time the conservatives on the court — or their supporters — whine about “penumbras” and expansion of rights beyond what’s in the text. While there is historical basis for the argument that individual self-defense in the home was on the mind of the Framers when they wrote the Second Amendment, that’s not what they actually wrote; indeed, the Second Amendment is the only one that comes to mind which actually gives a rationale for the rights it recognizes, and what it talks about is not personal self-defense in the home.
I don’t necessarily mind that extension of personal rights (see below), but I find it ironic that the conservative court members were willing to do just that when it served a pet cause of theirs, but condemn it when it comes to more “liberal” causes.
Now, that’s the rationale — what about the result?
I will confess to being of mixed minds on this, dating back to my old debating days in high school (one year was on legal reforms, and gun control was a hot topic pro-and-con). Guns in the home are very dangerous, no doubt about it, especially given the negligence in safety that some yahoos treat them with. A cursory review of the headlines describing kids shooting themselves or each other with the loaded gun they found in Daddy’s nightstand is proof of that.
By the same token, there are a lot of other unsafe things we keep around the house, even though there are sometimes tragedies with kids from those, too. Deciding that nobody can have something just because some people can’t keep it safely is not a good thing in my opinion.
I would rather have a society without personal gun ownership — but part of that is a society that doesn’t need personal gun ownership, and it’s not clear that we have that. If I feel that I need a gun in my house for personal safety, I’m not sure it’s right (let alone correct) to tell me I don’t and forbid me from doing so.
As BD notes, this opens up all sorts of challenges to other gun laws — though given the basis of personal self-defense, and the areas in which the SCOTUS majority did suggest that gun ownership could be regulated in some fashion, I don’t think the NRA will be very successful in arguing that we should be able to build machine-gun nests in our front yard. I hope.
I remember having a discussion about gun control with a cow-orker. It was extremely unproductive and frustrating until I realized that whenever I said “gun control,” he heard “complete ban on all guns.” When I pointed out that I never used the word “ban,” he informed me that “most people mean ‘ban’ when they say ‘gun control.'” As far as I know, he didn’t poll everybody on the planet to determine this, but accepted it as axiomatic.
One of his points was that people are killed by cars, and we don’t have “car control.” But we do! In order to legally own and operate a car in this country, you must pass a driver instruction course and a driver training course, as well as a written driving test, an eye exam, and an actual driving test. You must register the car and provide insurance (in all states?). You may be required to repeat some of these tests/requirements to maintain tour rights.
If we can do all of that for cars, the primary function of which is transportation, why can’t we hold people to similar standards of training and safety for guns, the function of which is a weapon? If you want the right to keep a gun in your house, you should have to accept the responsibilities as well.
What’s with all these activist judges legislating from the bench? Buncha lib–wait, what? 😀
Avo, the argument between cars and guns is that driving cars is a privilege, but gun ownership is a right. Thus one can have all sorts of requirements and restrictions and the other can only have minimum limits (i.e. Bribery is legal if you are giving money to a politian, and you cannot yell fire in a crowded theater, etc).
I am just all sorts giddy with the cans of worms all over the country that are going to be opened up with this ruling. Every Brady Bill type law will be challenged, all the conceal carry laws will be challenged, all restrictions on how to store guns and such will be challenged (Denver and Boulder will be hit with all of these), and I am sure that someone will take up the 1934 Firearms Act as well since the Miller ruling runs counter to todays ruling.
Now my fave part was just weeks ago he said this about restoring Habeas Corpus in this Country:
And yet…
How many more folks will this ruling kill, I mean, you would not say the first statement unless you were *really* concerned about the lives of your fellow man? Right?
Or is it all about something else?
As noted previously, figuring out whether there will be a net savings of life with more allowed handguns in the home is difficult to say, Scalia’s glibness notwithstanding.
The article linked to above would seem to indicate that a lot of the crazier legal challenges wouldn’t go far:
That said — yes, I imagine there will be a lot of suits to test the limits here.
Ummm…
You mean like long standing bans like the 32 year old handgun ban in DC of course?
No, with this ruling, even with Scalia making Kissy Faces with the press, there is so much in that 67 page ruling that I am sure that the NRA lawyers are going over it with a fine tooth comb to find every loop hole or statement that they can use in their favour to challange every gun law in the country.
Oh, I agree that the NRA will spearhead a lot of suits. How far they’ll get it’s hard to say.
Maybe right now it’s not important whether or not the citizenry is allowed to keep and bear arms, in any practical sense. Most people don’t hunt; they shop. Most private property doesn’t get broken into or trespassed upon most of the time.
What’s important right now is the principle of the thing. Because the day may return when private gun ownership is necessary. Maybe crime becomes so rampant and the police so ineffective that we need them to defend ourselves. Maybe the food production system collapses and we need to start hunting again to eat. Maybe disaster paralyzes or overwhelms emergancy services. And the biggie, maybe our government turns against us.
In each of these cases, we can’t rely on our civil institutions to protect or provide for us. We will have to do for ourselves. Having the tools to do so then becomes vital to our individual survival. If we give up the right to have the tools now, while we don’t really need it all that much, it becomes much harder to get that right back when we do need it.
Not even remotely what happened here. A major portion of the opinion is devoted to textual analysis explaining precisely why the preamble does not limit the right of “the People” codified in the operative clause. Another major portion is devoted to the fact that everywhere else the Constitution says “the People” it means individuals. IOW, there are no penumbrae here, just straightforward textual and historical analysis – all of which will be pretty much old hat to anyone who’s actually followed Second Amendment scholarship the last, oh, three decades.
I’m not a constitutional scholar by any means. “The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed” seems clear enough as a stated right, subject to the peripheral regulation that all rights included.
That said, the rationale given in the amendment, and the argument made (from a cursory reading, to be sure) in the decision, seem to be at odds.
And I should probably decline to talk further to the point until I’ve actually read the darned thing — which, heading off to camping, is not likely very soon.