33 State Attorneys Support 2nd Amendment (Part I)
From: NRA-ILA Daily Site Update and Reason.com
The Supreme Court Takes on Guns, Again
Brian Doherty | Thursday, October 01, 2009 3:30 PM
"It has been only a year and a season since the Supreme Court shook the world of Second Amendment jurisprudence with the historical D.C. v. Heller decision. In that case, the court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms against infringement by the federal government—at least commonly used arms, for self-defense in the home.
Heller opened the gates for a flood of new lawsuits by gun-rights friendly attorneys and organizations, most prominently the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation. One of those cases, McDonald v. Chicago, challenging a gun ban in Chicago that's similar in most respects to the D.C. gun laws overturned in Heller, has just been taken up by the Supreme Court.
The counsel who will be arguing McDonald before the court in early 2010 is the same man who won Heller, Alan Gura. Although McDonald's challenge to Chicago's laws has so far lost at both the district court level and at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gura is confident he'll win.
The Chicago laws at issue are as significant a violation of a citizen's right to bear arms as were D.C.'s. Chicago residents can't have a gun without registration, can't register handguns, can't register a gun that's already in their possession, and if they miss a yearly deadline to re-register, that weapon becomes forever unregisterable. Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation (with the Illinois State Rifle Association) have pulled together a set of plaintiffs with personal tales of having their quality of life lessened by the gun ban.
Lead plaintiff Otis McDonald has a habit of calling the cops when he sees gang activity in his neighborhood; this has led some neighborhood kids to threaten and intimidate him. Another plaintiff, Colleen Lawson, recently had three men break into her home. Both McDonald and Lawson insist that having a handgun in their home would increase both their safety and peace of mind.
Following Heller, it might seem clearcut that Chicago's gun control laws should meet the same fate as those in Washington, D.C. So why hasn't it worked out that way? The reason is that the Second Amendment, rare among the fundamental rights laid out in the Bill of Rights, has never been held to apply to actions of any government entity other than a federal one. (Of course, it wasn't even considered to do that until Heller.) In the legal lingo, the Second Amendment has not been "incorporated" against states and localities via the 14th Amendment. By contrast, the First Amendment (Gitlow v. New York), Fourth Amendment (Mapp v. Ohio), and others have been (but not, yet, the Third or Seventh). Furthermore, there is currently some disagreement on this question among different districts of the federal appeals court system.
The 7th Circuit has said no in various challenges to Chicago area gun laws, as has the 2nd Circuit, in the Maloney case. The 9th Circuit, however, earlier this year in the Nordyke case said that the Second Amendment does indeed bind states and localities—though the 9th Circuit recently heard another round of arguments in that case and has decided to postpone its decision until after the Supreme Court decides McDonald.
Yet as Gura has demonstrated at length in his McDonald filings—as have numerous gun-rights scholars, particularly Stephen Halbrook—the top concerns of the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment in 1868 were the ways the rights of African-American citizens were being violated with impunity in the post-Civil War South, often with the eager cooperation of local and state officials.
Among the fundamental rights noted by the amendment's boosters was the right to bear arms. The 14th Amendment's Senate sponsor, Jacob Howard, referred to the need to protect "'the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as freedom of speech and of the press;...the right to keep and bear arms....' Howard averred: 'The great object of the first section of this amendment is, therefore, to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees.'"
The 14th Amendment contains two phrases that could be used to protect individual rights against state and local government encroachment. The one that seems most clearly designed to do so is what Sen. Howard referred to above as "the first section," the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which says "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
However, that clause has been a dead letter in American jurisprudence since the Supreme Court's 1873 decision in The Slaughterhouse Cases, an incredibly convoluted set of challenges to a legal slaughterhouse monopoly in New Orleans.
As Gura summed up the dire result of that case to the Privileges or Immunities Clause in a July interview with me, it "declared pretty much that the only privileges and immunities protected by the 14th Amendment are those of national citizenship, rights that accrue out of the existence of the federal government, like the right to a passport or right to travel the waterways of the U.S. or to petition Congress." This made it forever useless as a tool to vindicate the sort of rights that the 14th Amendment's drafters intended.
(See Part II to Continue) - Heilung
The Supreme Court Takes on Guns, Again
Brian Doherty | Thursday, October 01, 2009 3:30 PM
"It has been only a year and a season since the Supreme Court shook the world of Second Amendment jurisprudence with the historical D.C. v. Heller decision. In that case, the court declared for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms against infringement by the federal government—at least commonly used arms, for self-defense in the home.
Heller opened the gates for a flood of new lawsuits by gun-rights friendly attorneys and organizations, most prominently the National Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation. One of those cases, McDonald v. Chicago, challenging a gun ban in Chicago that's similar in most respects to the D.C. gun laws overturned in Heller, has just been taken up by the Supreme Court.
The counsel who will be arguing McDonald before the court in early 2010 is the same man who won Heller, Alan Gura. Although McDonald's challenge to Chicago's laws has so far lost at both the district court level and at the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, Gura is confident he'll win.
The Chicago laws at issue are as significant a violation of a citizen's right to bear arms as were D.C.'s. Chicago residents can't have a gun without registration, can't register handguns, can't register a gun that's already in their possession, and if they miss a yearly deadline to re-register, that weapon becomes forever unregisterable. Gura and the Second Amendment Foundation (with the Illinois State Rifle Association) have pulled together a set of plaintiffs with personal tales of having their quality of life lessened by the gun ban.
Lead plaintiff Otis McDonald has a habit of calling the cops when he sees gang activity in his neighborhood; this has led some neighborhood kids to threaten and intimidate him. Another plaintiff, Colleen Lawson, recently had three men break into her home. Both McDonald and Lawson insist that having a handgun in their home would increase both their safety and peace of mind.
Following Heller, it might seem clearcut that Chicago's gun control laws should meet the same fate as those in Washington, D.C. So why hasn't it worked out that way? The reason is that the Second Amendment, rare among the fundamental rights laid out in the Bill of Rights, has never been held to apply to actions of any government entity other than a federal one. (Of course, it wasn't even considered to do that until Heller.) In the legal lingo, the Second Amendment has not been "incorporated" against states and localities via the 14th Amendment. By contrast, the First Amendment (Gitlow v. New York), Fourth Amendment (Mapp v. Ohio), and others have been (but not, yet, the Third or Seventh). Furthermore, there is currently some disagreement on this question among different districts of the federal appeals court system.
The 7th Circuit has said no in various challenges to Chicago area gun laws, as has the 2nd Circuit, in the Maloney case. The 9th Circuit, however, earlier this year in the Nordyke case said that the Second Amendment does indeed bind states and localities—though the 9th Circuit recently heard another round of arguments in that case and has decided to postpone its decision until after the Supreme Court decides McDonald.
Yet as Gura has demonstrated at length in his McDonald filings—as have numerous gun-rights scholars, particularly Stephen Halbrook—the top concerns of the drafters and ratifiers of the 14th Amendment in 1868 were the ways the rights of African-American citizens were being violated with impunity in the post-Civil War South, often with the eager cooperation of local and state officials.
Among the fundamental rights noted by the amendment's boosters was the right to bear arms. The 14th Amendment's Senate sponsor, Jacob Howard, referred to the need to protect "'the personal rights guaranteed and secured by the first eight amendments of the Constitution; such as freedom of speech and of the press;...the right to keep and bear arms....' Howard averred: 'The great object of the first section of this amendment is, therefore, to restrain the power of the States and compel them at all times to respect these great fundamental guarantees.'"
The 14th Amendment contains two phrases that could be used to protect individual rights against state and local government encroachment. The one that seems most clearly designed to do so is what Sen. Howard referred to above as "the first section," the Privileges or Immunities Clause, which says "No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States."
However, that clause has been a dead letter in American jurisprudence since the Supreme Court's 1873 decision in The Slaughterhouse Cases, an incredibly convoluted set of challenges to a legal slaughterhouse monopoly in New Orleans.
As Gura summed up the dire result of that case to the Privileges or Immunities Clause in a July interview with me, it "declared pretty much that the only privileges and immunities protected by the 14th Amendment are those of national citizenship, rights that accrue out of the existence of the federal government, like the right to a passport or right to travel the waterways of the U.S. or to petition Congress." This made it forever useless as a tool to vindicate the sort of rights that the 14th Amendment's drafters intended.
(See Part II to Continue) - Heilung
Total Comments 0
