DC/Heller ruling leaves nation polarized
by Dave Workman
Senior Editor
In the beginning, it was the Supreme Court’s 5-4 ideological split that defined the Second Amendment as protective of an individual right to keep and bear arms regardless of affiliation with a militia.
But the historic ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, quickly divided a nation, and in the aftermath there did not seem to be much middle ground. The evidence was clear, in the hysteria-steeped reaction by anti-gunners including Washington, DC, Mayor Adrian Fenty, California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, and Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, contrasting sharply with the victory remarks from gun rights leaders and activists, including Wayne LaPierre, executive vice president of the National Rifle Association, and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation.
Perhaps Daley’s outlook was glum because less than an hour after the high court announced its ruling, SAF and the Illinois State Rifle Association filed a federal lawsuit against Daley and the city of Chicago over the handgun ban there (see related story).
“This is a great moment in American history,” LaPierre said. “It vindicates individual Americans all over this country who have always known that this is their freedom worth protecting.”
“Wisdom and truth have triumphed over hysteria and falsehood,” Gottlieb added. “This decision makes it clear that a right ‘of the people’ is a right enjoyed by, and affirmed for, all citizens. It destroys a cornerstone of anti-gun rights elitism, which has fostered—through years of deceit and political demagoguery—the erosion of this important civil right.”
Scalia’s majority opinion brought to an end decades of dispute over the meaning of the Second Amendment. The high court ruled that the amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”
The opinion, supported by Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Anthony M. Kennedy, left the door open to regulation of the right, noting that “like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.”
“The court’s opinion,” Scalia wrote, “should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.”
The ruling also demolished the argument long advanced by anti-gunners that the 1939 Miller case relegated the right to bear arms as being conditional to militia service.
But Scalia’s majority opinion also castigated the arguments offered in the two dissenting opinions authored by liberal Justices John Paul Stevens and Steven G. Breyer, who were joined by David Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. In Stevens’ case, the majority opinion suggested that the argument put forth in his dissent that the Second Amendment’s right to bear arms would “cause the protected right to consist of the right to be a soldier or to wage war” amounted to “an absurdity that no commentator has ever endorsed.”
The majority also stated that Stevens’ arguments, based on his reading of the drafting history of the amendment, indicate that Stevens “flatly misreads the historical record.”
Scalia also wrote that “Justice Breyer’s assertion that individual self-defense is merely a ‘subsidiary interest’ of the right to keep and bear arms…is profoundly mistaken.”
Stevens lamented in his dissenting opinon that “I fear the District’s policy choice (the gun ban) may well be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table” by the majority opinion. He argued that the majority opinion upholding an individual right interpretation amounted to “the announcement of a new constitutional right to own and use firearms for private purposes…”
Breyer contended that gun violence in modern-day America had created an environment in which handguns contributed to the problem. He stated that “there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas.”
But Scalia countered in the final paragraph of his majority opinion that, “We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution…But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table.
“Undoubtedly,” he continued, “some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.”
The ruling ignited a firestorm, with supporters of the ban complaining that it will lead to increased violence in Washington, DC, and across the nation.
Polls run by several news organizations found an overwhelming majority of on-line respondents supported the individual rights ruling. That did not stop the invective from spilling over on several newspaper forums. It reached a fever pitch with the traditionally anti-gun Chicago Tribune calling for a repeal of the Second Amendment in an editorial the following day.
Within hours of the ruling, the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence was out with a fund-raising plea that declared, “The Heller decision will no doubt embolden ideological extremists to file new legal attacks on existing gun laws. But with the help of the Brady Center’s legal team, those attacks can, and must, be successfully resisted in the interest of public safety.”
They were attempting to raise $50,000 by June 30, and it was not clear whether they met that goal.
“We disagree with the Court’s decision giving individuals a right to possess guns for private purpose,” the news release stated. “However, what is critically important is that all nine Justices agreed that a wide variety of gun laws are constitutional, including restrictions on carrying concealed weapons, guns in schools and other sensitive places, and bans on ‘dangerous and unusual’ weapons.”
An anti-gun forum called “The Gun Guys” called the ruling a “misguided decision” that will lead to an increase in violent crime. They have an archive of stories about shooting victims called “America’s Shooting Gallery.”
“We only wish that the justices of the Supreme Court could have first looked at an archive similar to ours to see the devastation of guns in America,” the website stated. “Maybe, the discussion and subsequent ruling from the Court would have had a different outcome.”
But LaPierre disagreed with that assessment.
“Our founding fathers wrote and intended the Second Amendment to be an individual right,” he said. “The Supreme Court has now acknowledged it. The Second Amendment as an individual right now becomes a real permanent part of American Constitutional law.”
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