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<p>U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on Monday touted his approach to interpreting the federal Constitution that focuses on the original intent of the Founding Fathers.</p> <p>Scalia, a former University of Chicago law professor, called the “originalism” method “the lesser evil.”</p>

The successful plaintiff in “Heller 1,” the most important gun case in the last seven decades was interviewed Feb. 11 at the Nation’s Gun Show in Chantilly, Va. “When I go to the Nation’s Gun Show, I usually focus on the antique guns,” said Dick Heller, who in 2003 sued the District of Columbia, when the municipal government of the federal city denied his request to register a gun. In 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that the Second Amendment’s preamble, which discussed the value of a well-equipped militia, did not restrict the right to keep and bear arms. The court...

A federal judge in Washington has awarded attorneys who represented Dick Heller in the landmark Supreme Court case that recognized an individual right to posses arms just over $1.1 million in fees — about one-third of what they had requested.

Does the Second Amendment protect anything other than a handgun in the home? When anti-gun laws are challenged in court, should judges uphold repressive ordinances like the District of Columbia’s gun licensing scheme, which forces applicants to spend hundreds of dollars and dozens of hours just to buy an ordinary rifle? These are the questions being fought in the courts right now, in cases backed by the NRA. What answers the courts will provide are far from certain. The ultimate answers will depend on whether or not the next generation of federal judges is appointed by a President who values...

FAIRFAX, Va. --(Ammoland.com)- In a split ruling in an ongoing NRA-supported case challenging the restrictive gun laws established by the Washington D.C. government in defiance of the Supreme Court’s 2008 Heller decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has upheld a number of highly restrictive gun laws. Unfortunately, the court ruled that the District’s general handgun registration requirement is constitutional. However, the court reached that conclusion by misreading the Supreme Court’s Heller decision as presuming that any type of “longstanding” restriction is constitutional, so it only upheld the more traditional aspects of the registration system,...

Murder and violent crime rates were supposed to soar after the Supreme Court struck down gun control laws in Chicago and Washington, D.C.  Politicians predicted disaster. "More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," Washington’s Mayor Adrian Fenty warned the day the court made its decision.  Chicago’s Mayor Daley predicted that we would "go back to the Old West, you have a gun and I have a gun and we'll settle it in the streets . . . ."  The New York Times even editorialized this month about the Supreme Court's "unwise" decision that...

Four Republican senators seek to cut off money to czars in the Obama administration and force current and future czars to undergo a Senate confirmation. The senators, David Vitter of Louisiana, Rand Paul of Kentucky, Dean Heller of Nevada and Chuck Grassley of Iowa, have introduced the amendment in the Nominations Process Reform Bill. Heller said the amendment, which defines czar as the “head of any task force, council, policy office or similar office established by the president that has not been confirmed by the U.S. Senate,” excluding the National Security Advisor, could return some accountability to the current administration’s...

CARSON CITY, Nevada (AP) Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval has named Republican Rep. Dean Heller to replace John Ensign in the U.S. Senate. The appointment announced Wednesday sets in motion a political scramble on how Heller's seat in the House will be filled. State law says a special election must be held within 180 days of a vacancy.

Nevada Sen. John Ensign (R) plans to announce Friday he will resign his Senate seat, aides said Thursday. Ensign has been under investigation by the Senate Ethics Committee over whether he violated Senate rules during his affair with Cindy Hampton, a former campaign aide. Hampton’s husband, Doug Hampton, was Ensign’s deputy chief of staff during most of the extramarital relationship. Read more: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0411/53557.html#ixzz1KCVouaTc

Three-term Congressman Dean Heller says he will run for the U.S. Senate seat held by Nevada Republican John Ensign. Heller's announcement after months of alluding to a run comes a week after Ensign announced he won't seek a third term. Ensign says he wants to shield his family from campaign attacks stemming from his extramarital affair. Heller sent an e-mail to supporters Tuesday morning announcing his Senate run. He says he wants to curb government spending and heal Nevada's troubled economy. The Silver State has the highest unemployment in the nation at 14.2 percent. Heller's staff has said he would...

As a candidate for president, Sen. Barack Obama nonetheless pledged to revive the assault-weapons ban. These weapons serve no conceivable lawful purpose. Mayors and police chiefs, whose constituencies pay the bloodiest price for traffic in such guns, have pleaded for sensible laws. In Mexico, where assault weapons purchased in the United States have been responsible for tens of thousands of murders, Mr. Obama's counterpart, Felipé Calderon, has lodged similar requests. But President Obama has taken only minor steps toward redeeming Candidate Obama's promise. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, a nonprofit organization that advocates for gun control, noted that...

Fourteen years after being forced to plead guilty to the "crime" of owning a gun in Washington, the blot against the record of Dave Magnus may be cleared. On Thursday, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals recognized that one should not bear a stigma for the past possession of a firearm in the nation's capital for the purpose of self-defense. "A conviction for conduct that is not criminal, but is instead constitutionally-protected, is the ultimate miscarriage of justice," Judge Stephen H. Glickman wrote in the 12-page decision. Other officials failed to see matters with such clarity. The U.S. Attorney's...

BALTIMORE - Maryland's highest court has ruled the state's handgun laws are still constitutional despite a 2008 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court that gutted gun statutes in D.C. In an opinion issued Wednesday, the Maryland Court of Appeals affirmed a gun possession charge levied in Prince George's County against Charles F. Williams, Jr. Williams said the state's gun regulations violated his right to "keep and carry arms" under the Second Amendment, and based his argument in part on the Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller. The high court in that case said barring a person from...

It didn’t happen … again. Seems whenever proponents of gun control – the perpetually confused and fearful critters that they be – watch law and society move against them, they predict Armageddon. When America had only ten states allowing people to carry concealed firearms, and Florida had the Audacity to Hope to Change that, every anti-freedom politician and two-bit flack hollered that Thermopylae levels of blood would flow through the streets. Three decades and 31 states later, it didn’t happen. In fact, crime has fallen, especially the violent variety. Even in bloody Washington D.C. ... In 2008 when the Supreme...

The District finished 2010 with 131 homicides — a 9 percent reduction from 2009 and the lowest number of killings in the nation's capital since 1963. ... Montgomery County saw an increase from 13 homicides in 2009 to 17 last year. ... Fairfax County also recorded a modest increase, from 14 killings in 2009 to 16 last year, while Arlington County recorded one killing last year compared with two in 2009. For the District, the continued declines in homicides during this decade to nearly half-century lows are impressive. The city less than 20 years ago recorded 482 killings, when turf...

Gun owners in St. Louis and elsewhere doubtless recall the rabid opposition among the District of Columbia's political class, to private gun ownership by American citizens. From the outright handgun ban implemented in 1976, to the stubborn defense of that ban, ending with the Heller case, to the ultra-restrictive everything-short-of-an-outright-ban laws which replaced that ban, to the District's willingness to sacrifice its bid for "voting rights," because they would only come packaged with a repeal of those ultra-restrictive gun laws; D.C. has for decades restricted gun ownership to the absolute maximum degree it could get away with. Meanwhile, D.C. is...

Nov. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Washington, D.C., gun owners told a federal appeals court that the city's firearm registration process and a ban on certain types of weapons violate their constitutional rights. The lawyer for Dick Heller, the plaintiff in a U.S. Supreme Court case in 2008 that set a national standard for Second Amendment rights, and three other plaintiffs said Washington's regulations are the most stringent in the U.S. and inconsistent with Supreme Court rulings. The case, known as Heller II, is seeking to overturn restrictions on firearms possession the District of Columbia imposed after Heller won his previous case....

Md. (AP) - Maryland Attorney General Doug Gansler told members of the state's top court Thursday that recent U.S. Supreme Court rulings prove state laws restricting people's right to carry guns in public are constitutional, despite the arguments of a man seeking to overturn the law. An attorney representing Charles F. Williams Jr., who was arrested in 2007 for carrying a handgun in public in Prince George's County, argued the same two recent rulings protect his client's right to bear arms. Two years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a D.C. ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement...

The Second Amendment finally applies to the states. Now the fight over gun rights really begins. It was the morning of June 26, 2008, and Alan Gura had just won the first case he’d ever argued in front of the Supreme Court. Before taking a media victory lap to celebrate his historic vindication of the Second Amendment in D.C. v. Heller, Gura headed to the Court’s public information office for a moment of privacy. He called an old buddy from law school, the Chicago attorney David Sigale. “File it,” Gura said. “It” became, almost exactly two years later, Gura’s second...

How gun prohibitionists and an image-conscious NBA scapegoated a basketball star On December 19, 2009, NBA star Gilbert Arenas and fellow Washington Wizards player Javaris Crittenton got into a heated argument over a card game, exchanging violent threats. (Arenas maintains that his were made in jest.) After Crittenton challenged him to a fistfight, Arenas told his younger teammate he was too old to fight him, but he’d burn his SUV or shoot him in the face instead. Crittenton answered that he’d shoot Arenas in his surgically repaired left knee. Two days later, before practice at Washington, D.C.’s Verizon Center, Arenas...

Some gun control advocates have declared that the McDonald case (and the Heller case before it) will not affect most laws currently in place because they simply constitute “reasonable regulation” of the purchase and possession of guns. However, nowhere in either Heller or McDonald did the Supreme Court rule that so-called “reasonable” laws are valid under the Second Amendment. Accordingly, anyone who defends a law claiming that it is “reasonable” is not stating any legal standard or offering any basis upon which to judge whether such a law would survive a legal challenge. As it turns out, New Jersey gun...

"In an important Second Amendment decision that charts a course for evaluating the validity of gun laws now that the U.S. Supreme Court has declared the right to be an individual one, the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has refused to strike down a federal law that bans possession of guns with obliterated serial numbers… McLaughlin held that the Second Amendment does not protect a right to own handguns with obliterated serial numbers and that 922(k) does not meaningfully burden the "core" right recognized in Heller -- the right to possess firearms for defense of hearth and home." See...

Can we stop pretending that liberal jurisprudence is anything but warmed over politics in a judicial robe?  Yesterday's decision by the Supreme Court in McDonald v. Chicago proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that the left-leaning justices will vote what they believe regardless of what a law's intentions were.  Concepts like 'stare decisis' (the legal principle that obliges judges to respect precedents established by prior decisions) that were so important during the confirmation hearings of Justice Roberts, mean nothing to the sitting liberal justices.  Each of the left leaning judges voted as if The District of Columbia vs Heller...

One of the most illuminating questions in respect of the Supreme Court’s ruling on the right to keep and bear arms is whether it should be applauded by the liberals or by conservatives — or both. The court, in a case called McDonald v. Chicago, followed a ruling two years ago, in a case called District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court said that the federal government could not infringe the rights vouched safe by the Second Amendment. In the latest case it extended that logic, deciding that the Second Amendment does apply to the states and municipalities....

In a sharply divided 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled Monday that state governments are not able to ban most Americans from owning most types of handguns. The majority decision, written by Justice Samuel Alito, stated that firearms are "essential for self-defense." Predictably, gun control advocates bemoaned the ruling. But the court's decision is not just correct on constitutional grounds. It will help make the country safer. Another View The gun pushers lobby must be disappointed, since the Supreme Court ruling continues to allow for a wide variety of reasonable gun laws, says Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Center...

Second Amendment: In the "living Constitution" era, the Supreme Court rediscovers original intent and rightly rules that the right to bear arms applies to all Americans just as the rest of the Bill of Rights does. It's hard to conceive how the justices could have decided otherwise. But by the narrowest of margins — 5-4 — they have reaffirmed that keeping and bearing arms is an inalienable and individual right like speech and religion, and that it applies to all individuals as the Founding Fathers intended. Why anyone thinks the Second Amendment does not apply to all Americans is a...

The Supreme Court has now incorporated the Second Amendment against the states. But the impact of that decision may turn out to be fairly limited. In most states, there will be little if any change in the actual extent of gun regulation. The ideologically divided nature of the Court’s decision suggests that the legal status of the Second Amendment isn’t yet completely secure. That said, the decision will have a substantial practical impact in a few areas and it also represents a tremendous symbolic victory for gun rights advocates. I. Limited Practical Impact. On balance, I agree with scholars such...

Second Amendment: Chicago is deciding whether to prosecute a great-grandfather and Korean War veteran under its handgun ban. He refused to be a victim, and now there's one less armed thug roaming the streets. What's the problem? If the 80-year-old vet living on the city's West Side didn't have the gun the city said he shouldn't have, he and his 83-year-old wife and 12-year-old great-grandson might have joined those victims of gun violence about whom gun-control advocates constantly chirp. The vet obtained the gun in violation of the city's handgun ban after a prior incident in which the couple was...

CHICAGO (CBS) ― They are law-abiding citizens in Chicago, but they are so worried about their own safety, they say they might have to break the law. The last straw was the death of Chicago Police officer Thomas Wortham IV last week. That has some African-American families in Chicago considering doing something they never would have done before: carry a pistol. CBS 2's Jim Williams reports he grew up among those families and he's never anything like it. Many Chicagoans have been upset for some time about violence here, but Wortham's murder has touched a raw nerve in the black...

Gun Rights: Not happy with interfering in our internal affairs by savaging Arizona's new immigration law, the president of Mexico wants to shred our Second Amendment too. And the mayor of Chicago wants to help. There stood Mexican President Felipe Calderon before Congress, blaming America for the violence on his side of the border and, among other things, the guns that fuel the Mexican drug war that has claimed more than 23,000 Mexican lives since he took office in 2006. Rather than taking responsibility himself, he shoved the blame on America. It would all stop, he implied, if America would...

Lawyers for the District of Columbia who are fighting an effort to expose the time and money the city and its outside attorneys spent in its ultimately unsuccessful defense of the city's handgun ban said this week that the private counsel who helped the District all served pro bono. The District's Office of the Attorney General does not want to provide billing record information to the attorneys who defeated the firearm ban in the U.S. Supreme Court in 2008. Those attorneys, including Alan Gura of Alexandria, Va.'s Gura & Possessky, said information about the city’s effort is relevant to the...

NRA-Backed Second Amendment Enforcement Act Introduced in U.S. Congress Tuesday, April 27, 2010Fairfax, Va. - The National Rifle Association announced its support for critical legislation being introduced in Congress today by Senators John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Jon Tester (D-Mont.), and Representatives Travis Childers (D-Miss.) and Mark Souder (R-Ind.). The Second Amendment Enforcement Act will restore Second Amendment rights to residents of the District of Columbia. This legislation is necessary because the D.C. Council continues to circumvent the Supreme Court’s historic 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller.Chris W. Cox, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, said,...

This news is a couple of weeks old, but I don't think anyone here has discussed it yet: Last month a federal judge upheld the firearm regulations that Washington, D.C., enacted after the Supreme Court overturned its gun ban in the 2008 case D.C. v. Heller. Dick Heller, the lead plaintiff in the Supreme Court case, challenged the new rules, arguing that D.C.'s onerous gun registration requirements, its ban on "assault weapons," and its prohibition of magazines holding more than 10 rounds violate the Second Amendment. U.S. District Judge Richard Urbina disagreed, saying all of the regulations are "substantially related...

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., will have the chance to examine the latest version of the District of Columbia's gun restrictions, in a possible test of how to apply the U.S. Supreme Court's 2008 decision in D.C. v. Heller. Lawyers for Dick Heller, a name party in the earlier case, filed a notice Thursday that they will continue fighting in this follow-up case. They are appealing to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reverse a March 26 decision by U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina. That ruling upheld new restrictions the D.C. Council passed in...

These are the offspring of Heller: A woman contends her small stature makes her an appealing target for criminals but says she was turned down for a concealed-carry handgun permit by the Sacramento County sheriff. A Californian man, born without an arm below the right elbow, argues that the state’s roster of “approved” handguns precludes him from being able to buy a left-handed Glock. An American man who now lives in Canada would like to purchase guns in the U.S. to store at his relatives’ home in Mount Vernon, Ohio, to use for sporting and self-defense. All are now plaintiffs...

·11250 Waples Mill Road ·   Fairfax, Virginia 22030    ·800-392-8683   Court Dismisses "Heller II" Case: D.C. Gun Registration, "Assault Weapon" Ban, and "Large" Magazine Ban Upheld   Friday, March 26, 2010   Today, District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, dismissed Heller v. District of Columbia, NRA's case challenging D.C.'s prohibitive firearm registration requirements, and its bans on "assault weapons" and "large capacity ammunition feeding devices." Mr. Heller was, of course, lead plaintiff in District of Columbia v. Heller, decided by the Supreme Court in 2008.Judge Urbina rejected Heller's assertion that D.C.'s registration...

Judge Ricardo Urbina of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia ruled Friday that the Washington, D.C., firearm ordinances enacted after the Supreme Court's D.C. v. Heller decision in 2008 "permissibly regulate the exercise of the core Second Amendment right to use firearms for the purpose of self-defense in the home." Urbina dismissed a case brought by Dick Heller, the same plaintiff who challenged the previous D.C. ordinance in the Supreme Court. Heller challenged the District's firearms registration process, its ban on assault weapons and its prohibition of "large capacity ammunition feeding devices," claiming they violated the Second...

A federal judge in Washington, applying the Supreme Court’s 2008 decision creating a constitutional right to have a gun, ruled on Friday that three new gun control restrictions in the Nation’s capital city survive a Second Amendment challenge. In the ruling by U.S. District Judge Ricardo M. Urbina, the District of Columbia government’s laws requiring that guns be registered and banning assault weapons and large-capacity bullet-feeding devices are valid. The case is Heller, et al., v. District of Columbia (District Court docket 08-1289); the opinion can be found here. (The lead individual in the case, government security guard Dick Anthony...

In a case that drew attention from the Gun Owners Action League and the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the Supreme Judicial Court yesterday upheld a state law requiring trigger locks on guns kept in people’s homes. In what was seen by some as a victory for law enforcement and advocates of gun control, the state’s highest court ruled that the Second Amendment does not restrict the right of Massachusetts to impose its own rules on gun ownership. “We conclude that the legal obligation safely to secure firearms in [state law] is not unconstitutional,’’ Justice Ralph Gants wrote for...

Otis McDonald, 76, stands before the Supreme Court, which Tuesday heard arguments in his suit to overturn Chicago's handgun ban Gun Rights: Otis McDonald, 76, an Army vet who lives in a high-crime area of Chicago, thinks the Constitution gives him the right to bear arms to protect himself and his wife as he protected his country. We think so too. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments on behalf of four Chicago residents led by homeowner McDonald, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association to overturn Chicago's three-decade-old ban on owning handguns. In a 5-4...

The year after the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's handgun ban and gun-lock requirements, the capital city's murder rate plummeted 25 percent. The high court should keep that in mind today as it hears oral arguments about a Chicago handgun ban. Gun controllers screamed to high heaven that impending disaster would follow the court's decision to junk some of the district's gun controls. One of those screaming the loudest was Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, who incorrectly predicted more gun freedom would lead to more death and Wild West shootouts. Instead, in Washington, murder rates rose when...

Go to the head of the class. Wow, what a piece this time. This week's gun ban case McDonald v. Chicago will be, as I pointed out last week, a case where self-rule itself is on trial. Last week, I said, at its heart, McDonald is about self-rule v. city rule. Today's Los Angeles Times has an Op-Ed piece A Bill of rights battle. It's a headline aptly named. The editorial board writes, "For us the choice is clear: The Bill of Rights should apply to the whole country." Agreed. But it is the last line that says it all...

On Thursday, Dec. 17, Justice Ginsburg spoke at a luncheon of the Harvard Club of Washington, D.C. I was not present at the luncheon, but I have heard, third-hand, that she spoke on the value of dissenting opinions. She said that sometimes a dissent can become the majority of a “future, wiser court.” As an example, she pointed to the dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller.

A federal appeals court has overturned the conviction of a Wisconsin man barred from owning firearms because of his criminal record, ruling the lifetime prohibition may violate Americans' Second Amendment rights and calling into question the future of a 13-year old gun control law. In a 3-0 decision on Wednesday, the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals ordered a trial judge to take a second look at the evidence that a 1996 federal law prohibiting anyone convicted of a "misdemeanor crime of domestic violence" is constitutional in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that emphasized "the individual right...

Alan Gura, who successfully defended the individual right to keep and bear arms under Second Amendment in District of Columbia v. Heller has now filed his brief in the case that seeks to apply that right to the states, McDonald v. City of Chicago. (Cato earlier filed a brief supporting Alan’s cert petition, the background to which you can read about here.) The question presented in this case is: Whether the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms is incorporated as against the States by the Fourteenth Amendment’s Privileges or Immunities or Due Process Clauses. Remarkably, only 7 of...

Application of Second Amendment to be decided by Supreme Court Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll Lawyer Alan Gura says that owning semi-automatic guns is constitutional. The man who successfully challenged a prohibition against handguns in the District of Columbia before the Supreme Court said last night during a local debate about the Second Amendment that some states have gone too far. That's what happened in the District of Columbia, which required that firearms either be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, said Alan Gura, a lawyer from Alexandria, Va., who argued the Supreme Court case. "If you have a...

Much has been written (including some by myself and other Gun Rights Examiners--see links beneath the photo) about the impending McDonald v. City of Chicago case to be heard by the Supreme Court early next year. In this case, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association are challenging Chicago's handgun ban (the NRA also eventually became involved). Probably the biggest issue that will be decided here is whether or not the Second Amendment is to be incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment, and thus apply to state and local governments, as well as to the feds. If SCOTUS...

lredmond@lowellsun.com BOSTON -- As a Billerica gun case heads to the state's highest court next week, the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence, the International Brotherhood of Police Officers, Police Chiefs and other high-profile groups are urging the Supreme Judicial Court to reject the constitutional challenge to the state's safe firearm-storage law. The groups are joining with Middlesex District Attorney Gerard Leone, who is challenging a Lowell District Court judge's ruling that dismissed a gun-storage case against Richard Runyan, a Billerica man who kept an unlocked semiautomatic hunting rifle under his bed where it could be accessed by his teenage...

I've written recently about how courts in New Jersey and Illinois have concluded that the Second Amendment poses no obstacle to local governments enacting stringent anti-gun laws. Now a Maryland appeals court has followed suit. A three-judge panel ruled last Thursday that the Second Amendment does not interfere with a Maryland law that generally restricts state residents from carrying handguns. That's not much of a surprise. What is remarkable is that Judge Albert Matricciani went out of his way to write that even if the Second Amendment applied to state laws, Maryland's statute would be perfectly constitutional in the wake...

That’s the title of a new article in the Columbia Law Review (the link is just to an abstract, since no PDF is available). The law review asked me whether I could write a commentary for its online supplement (the Sidebar), and I did, here, under the title The First and Second Amendments; the author’s response to my response is here. Here’s the text of my article (for the footnotes, see the version I link to above): I. The Supposed Analogy to Obscenity Analogies between the First Amendment and the Second (and comparable state constitutional protections) are over 200 years...