Silent on central questions of gun control for two centuries, the US Supreme Court found its voice on Thursday in a decision that affirms the right to have guns in the home for self-defense and deals with a riddle almost as old as the republic over what the US Constitution means when it says the people may keep and bear arms.
The court’s 5-4 ruling struck down the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns and imperiled similar prohibitions in other cities, Chicago and San Francisco, among them.
Federal gun restrictions, however, were expected to remain largely intact.
The court’s historic awakening on the meaning of the Second Amendment brought a curiously mixed response, muted in some unexpected places.
The reaction broke less along party lines than along the divide between cities wracked with gun violence and rural areas where gun ownership is embedded in daily life. Democrats have all but abandoned their long push for stricter gun laws at the national level after deciding it is a losing issue for them. Republicans welcomed what they called a powerful precedent.
Democratic Senator Barack Obama, who is from Chicago, straddled both sides of the issue and said merely that the court did not find an unfettered right to bear arms and that the ruling “will provide much-needed guidance to local jurisdictions across the country.”
Another Chicagoan, Democratic Mayor Richard Daley, called the ruling “very frightening” and predicted more violence and higher taxes to pay for extra police if his city’s gun restrictions are lost.
Republican Senator John McCain welcomed the ruling as “a landmark victory for Second Amendment freedom.”
The court had not conclusively interpreted the Second Amendment since its ratification in 1791.
The amendment reads: “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”
The basic issue for the justices was whether the amendment protects an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or whether that right is somehow tied to service in a state militia, a once-vital, now-archaic grouping of citizens. That has been the heart of the gun control debate for decades.
Writing for the majority on Thursday, Justice Antonin Scalia said an individual right to bear arms exists and is supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.
US President George W. Bush said: “I applaud the Supreme Court’s historic decision today confirming what has always been clear in the Constitution: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear firearms.”
The full implications of the decision, however, are not sorted out. Still to be seen, for example, is the extent to which the right to have a gun for protection in the home may extend outside the home.
Scalia said the Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”
The court also struck down requirements in the capital that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but left intact the licensing of guns.
The District of Columbia already allows shotguns and rifles to be kept in homes if they are registered, kept unloaded and taken apart or equipped with trigger locks.
Scalia noted that the handgun is Americans’ preferred weapon of self-defense in part because “it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police.”
He said nothing in the ruling should “cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.”
In a concluding paragraph to the 64-page opinion, Scalia said the justices in the majority “are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country” and believe the Constitution “leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns.”
DC Mayor Adrian Fenty responded with a plan to require residents to register their handguns.
“More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” Fenty said.
In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority “would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the framers [of the Constitution] made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”
He said such evidence “is nowhere to be found.”
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, “In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas.”
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