Guns in America, part I

The historic Supreme Court Case DC v. Heller started today with arguments from both the District and the Plaintiff. In case you've been living under a rock lately, this is the DC handgun case, challenging the District's gun laws that ban handguns and prevent residents from keeping rifles or shotguns assembled ad loaded at home.

This case will pretty much determine what the Second Amendment actually protects-a state's collective right to form a militia, or an individual right to bear arms. The last time the Supreme Court heard a case on the topic was back in 1939, in U.S. v. Miller. It involved a criminal prosecution under the National Firearms Act of 1934, requiring certain forms of firearms to be registered and a $200 tax to be paid upon it at the time of registration. Jack Miller, the plaintiff, was arrested for transporting a sawed-off shotgun across state lines. When the US District Court in Arkansas heard the case, the judge agreed with the defense that the NFA violated the individual's right to bear arms granted under the Second Amendment, also calling it an attempt by the government to usurp the policing power of the states. It then went to the Supreme Court, where the court decided that the NFA did not violate the Second Amendment, saying, "In the absence of any evidence tending to show that possession or use of a 'shotgun having a barrel of less than eighteen inches in length' at this time has some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right to keep and bear such an instrument."

The ruling has been interpreted various ways by both gun control and gun rights advocates. Everyone's pretty much agreed for a while though, that US v. Miller didn't clarify anything at all.

The big question is- what was the intent of the Second Amendment? Was it to protect the collective right to form a militia or an individual right to own and carry guns?

So far, it looks like the justices are leaning all kinds of ways on the issue.

"I don't see how there's any, any, any contradiction between reading the second clause as a -- as a personal guarantee and reading the first one as assuring the existence of a militia...," Justice Antonin Scalia said. "But why isn't it perfectly plausible, indeed reasonable, to assume that since the framers knew that the way militias were destroyed by tyrants in the past was not by passing a law against militias, but by taking away the people's weapons -- that was the way militias were destroyed."

Justice Stephen Breyer seemed to be looking for answers on the practicality of the DC law. After quoting some of the statistics on gun-related crime (80,000-100,000 people every year in the US are either killed or wounded in gun-related homicides/crimes/accidents/suicides, guessing the stats in the District as being approximately 200-300 dead and 1,500-2000 wounded annually), he asked, "Now, in light of that, why isn't a ban on handguns, while allowing the use of rifles and muskets, a reasonable or a proportionate response on behalf of the District of Columbia?"

Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty has given his opinion on the law pretty plainly- he wants it to stay in place. "This is a public safety case," Fenty has said. " Handguns represent a disproportionate number of crimes in the District of Columbia: everything from homicides to robbery to rape." He predicted that the repeal of the handgun ban would lead to more crime and violence, saying "The fact that we have had a handgun ban has significantly curtailed the number of violent crimes in the city."

Should be interesting to see what happens here- it doesn't look like the justices are leaning either way yet.

Here's the transcript of the arguments today.

I'll post my personal thoughts on all this soon.

-HG