Guns & Ammo: The Right to Bear Arms
U.S. Supreme Court: District of Columbia v. Heller
Here’s what the Second Amendment says: “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 debate between advocates of gun control and defenders of the right to bear arms has focused on whether, as gun controllers read it, the Second Amendment guarantees that right to a “well regulated Militia” (whatever that is), or as gun owners see it, to individuals, since “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed.”
In another 5 - 4 decision, the Supreme Court took dead aim at the question and put the issue to rest. Kind of. It said the DC law which prohibited the registration of hand guns (to deter their purchase), required individuals to keep lawfully owned guns unloaded and disassembled or rendered inoperative by a trigger lock even in the home (making them worthless as tools of self defense), violated the Second Amendment. Such a restrictive law is really a prohibition of handguns, and the court shot it down.
The court went on to emphatically state that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, but still recognized that the right is not unlimited, and that reasonable restrictions and regulations (such as carry permits, prohibitions on gun ownership by felons or the mentally ill) have been (and can be) upheld under the Second Amendment.
The debate about our individual right to bear arms is over and the Supreme Court has given gun ownership advocates new ammunition to strike down unlawful restrictions on handguns. It remains to be seen if legislators have the creativity to enact laws (see U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit: City of New York v. Beretta U.S.A. Corp.) which keep guns out of the hands of criminals without infringing the guaranteed right of law-abiding citizens to own one.
