Showdown on Second Amendment Looms
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
This is the “big one,” the one for “all the marbles.”
Or so many are thinking as the fallout continues in the wake of last month’s landmark 2-1 ruling by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that declared the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms “beyond that needed to preserve the state militias.”
The ruling in Parker v District of Columbia will very likely be discussed at length as the National Rifle Association gathers for its 136th annual members meeting in St. Louis, MO. Lead plaintiff’s attorney Alan Gura recently was quoted by CNSNews that he has assurances from NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre that the association is “not interested in ruining the case,” an apparent reference to legislation now in Congress that could overturn the Washington, DC, gun ban and make the case moot; legislation that NRA supports.
LaPierre and NRA President Sandra Froman told Gun Week in exclusive interviews that if the high court does take this case, it will have an enormous effect. And both also said that while they could not imagine how a serious scholarly judicial review of the Second Amendment could ever support anything other than the individual rights interpretation, nobody can predict for sure what will be the final outcome.
Froman said that the ruling does demonstrate the importance of what she has been saying since joining the NRA board 15 years ago in Salt Lake City about the importance of getting good, conservative, scholarly judges appointed to the federal bench, and the Supreme Court.
“For a number of years, pro-gun scholars have been working on the scholarship in this area,” Froman noted. “People have been writing about this, preparing the ground so that when the seed of this was planted, it would grow straight and true.”
The scholarship that has been published over the past 15 years has been decisively in support of the individual rights. Froman, LaPierre, Gura and Chris Cox, executive director of NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action, all concurred in separate talks with Gun Week that Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman “really did his homework” before writing his majority opinion in the Parker case.
They also agreed that this case, should it go before the high court as many predict it will, is likely to have a monumental impact on the presidential campaign in 2008.
“It could change the political landscape on who people will vote for,” Gura suggested. “It will put the gun issue back in the political spotlight.”
Since the ruling came down March 9, gun rights Internet forums have been furiously debating the case, and the potential course it could take.
According to Cox, this is entirely up to the courts. If the entire District appeals court decides to hear an appeal en banc, that might delay the case for a while. But the prevailing wisdom right now is that the case will go directly to the high court. The justices will decide whether they will grant a hearing, or reject it, thereby allowing the ruling to stand only in DC.
A favorable ruling is something that appears to have gun control activists even more alarmed than the gun community worries about a bad ruling, although nobody wants to be the loser in this contest.
On the other hand, LaPierre said that if such a ruling came down against the individual rights interpretation, “a firestorm would erupt at the grassroots level and a political tsunami would sweep over Washington, DC,” because the overwhelming majority of citizens simply believe that they have an individual right to own a firearm.
Froman and Cox both suggested that the Parker case does offer “a unique opportunity.” This is not a criminal case but a civil case, and the litigants are all “good, upstanding people, good law abiding peaceable people who just want to defend themselves,” Froman noted.
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