Free Republic

As Brian Doherty noted earlier, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals has held that the 2nd Amendment does not apply against state and local governments. In more positive gun rights news, the Constitutional Accountability Center, a liberal law firm and think tank "dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of our Constitution's text and history," filed a friend of the court brief last week on behalf of the plaintiffs in McDonald v. City of Chicago, arguing that the 14th Amendment's Privileges or Immunities Clause does make the 2nd Amendment applicable against the states (Alan Gura, the lawyer who argued D.C. v....

Today we filed our opening brief in the Court of Appeals. The basic arguments may be familiar to those who have followed the proceedings below, but we had somewhat more room to work with at this stage, not to mention the decision below required a response. All three remaining Chicago-area cases, ours and the two brought by the NRA against Chicago and Oak Park, have been consolidated on appeal. That means that they will be heard and decided together by the same panel, and the parties on both sides are to minimize the degree of overlapping arguments among them. We’ll...

If the issue weren’t so serious for our nation, the irony would be delicious. Eric Holder, President Obama’s choice for Attorney General is justly criticized for many things. But the fact that he recommended that President Clinton pardon and release from prison unrepentant FALN terrorists while at nearly the same time advocating that law-abiding gun owners be imprisoned if their registration papers are not in order reveals a hard core left wing agenda. Eric Holder’s agenda is to make exercise of Second Amendment rights a minefield where an innocent misstep will land you in the penitentiary. When I testified against...

HOLDER:...I think you had asked me earlier about the regulations that I thought might still exist, post-Heller. And I had mentioned, I think, closing the gun show loophole, the banning of cop-killer bullets and I also think that making the assault weapons ban permanent would be something that would be permitted under Heller, and I also think would be good for my law enforcement perspective.

The Law Review article can be found here. I guess that I felt that this was also likely simply because Obama won the election.

Gun control in the United States generally has meant some type of supply regulation. Some rules are uncontroversial like usertargeted restrictions that define the untrustworthy and prohibit them from accessing the legitimate supply.

Parks, D.C. Dragging Their Feet The Heller case struck down D.C.'s ban on handguns, and its ban on having a loaded firearm in your home. The D.C. government is still trying hard to discourage gun use without directly violating the Heller decision. For example, their latest gun control law would require gun owners to re-register their guns every three years, continues their longstanding ban on "assault weapons," require completion of a gun safety course, and have a background check done every six years.1 While gun registration is clearly constitutional, some of these provisions, simply because they impose a repeated cost...

"Well, the show sure ended with a bang. On the last day of the Term, the Court — for the first time ever, by a single vote, over vigorous dissents, and against the weight of circuit precedent — wielded the Second Amendment to strike down a federal gun control measure and to declare a robust individual right to use firearms for self-defense." "Experts began parsing District of Columbia v. Heller within hours of the Court’s pronouncement. Over the ensuing weeks, sophisticated commentary blossomed in a rich profusion of blogs, wikis, posts, threads, and chats. Now, nearly five months after the...

D.C.'s City Council continues its constantly shifting reaction to the Supreme Court's Heller decision that overturned its gun ban. (See here and here for some of their post-Heller scramblings.) This week, they vote to enforce "safety training" before a gun can be legally registered in D.C. D.C.'s City Paper with the details. The key part for the future: At the last council meeting, Councilmember Mary M. Cheh had proposed the measure as an amendment to the bill governing the regulation of handguns. Since then, the mayor’s office raised concerns about the possibility that such a requirement, shared with very few...

WASHINGTON — Nearly six months after the Supreme Court put an end to the District of Columbia’s decades-old ban on handgun possession, the City Council here passed a sweeping new ordinance on Tuesday to regulate gun ownership. The legislation would require all gun owners to receive five hours of safety training and to register their firearms every three years. In addition, they would have to undergo a criminal background check every six years. Councilman Phil Mendelson, who helped draft the bill and shepherd it through the Council, called it a “very significant piece of legislation that borrows best practices from...

The D.C. Council on Tuesday gave final approval to regulations governing guns in the District, six months after the Supreme Court struck down the city's decades-old ban on handguns. "It's been a pretty comprehensive effort, and I think we've got a good, balanced program that balances safety with the Second Amendment right to have a handgun for self-defense in the home," D.C. Attorney General Peter Nickles said. The council unanimously passed legislation requiring D.C. gun owners to register their weapons every three years and go through a background check every six years.

Today is the United States´ Bill of Rights Day, but District of Columbia residents are second-class citizens when it comes to the Second Amendment. President-elect Barack Obama certainly does not support it. When I filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court this June supporting the respondent in District of Columbia v. Heller on behalf of 55 senators, the senate president, and 250 representatives, Obama declined. And his voting record in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Congress has been as hostile to American gun owners as King George III was in 1775. What´s in store for Second Amendment rights...

Of the many critiques that followed the Supreme Court's landmark gun rights decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, perhaps the most interesting came from conservative federal Judge J. Harvey Wilkinson III. In a Virginia Law Review article entitled "Of Guns, Abortions, and the Unraveling Rule of Law," Wilkinson denounced Justice Antonin Scalia's majority opinion for engaging in judicial activism and compared the reasoning in Heller to that in the abortion rights case Roe v. Wade (not exactly a compliment from one conservative judge to another). Now George Mason Univesity's Nelson Lund and the Independence Institute's David Kopel have written...

In keeping one's eye on the ferment in lower courts on gun issues post-Heller, Eugene Volokh at the Volokh Conspiracy finds an interesting footnote in a U.S District Court for Utah memorandum opinion and order.(pdf) The order allows the (partial) moving forward of a lawsuit charging some police officers of 4th Amendment excessive force violations due to their ruffian behavior against a man in Salt Lake City who didn't, because he was physically unable to, raise both hands above his head when ordered to by the cops. The details of the story in Volokh's post make for aggravating reading, to...

Well, the show sure ended with a bang. On the last day of the Term, the Court — for the first time ever, by a single vote, over vigorous dissents, and against the weight of circuit precedent — wielded the Second Amendment to strike down a federal gun control measure and to declare a robust individual right to use firearms for self-defense. Experts began parsing District of Columbia v. Heller1 within hours of the Court’s pronouncement. Over the ensuing weeks, sophisticated commentary blossomed in a rich profusion of blogs, wikis, posts, threads, and chats. Now, nearly five months after the...

<p>Of conservatives' few victories this year, the most cherished came when the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Now, however, a distinguished conservative jurist argues that the court's ruling was mistaken and had the principal flaws of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion ruling that conservatives execrate as judicial overreaching. Both rulings, says J. Harvie Wilkinson, suddenly recognized a judicially enforceable right grounded in "an ambiguous constitutional text."</p>

<p>WASHINGTON -- Of conservatives' few victories this year, the most cherished came when the Supreme Court, in District of Columbia v. Heller, held for the first time that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms. Now, however, a distinguished conservative jurist argues that the court's ruling was mistaken and had the principal flaws of Roe v. Wade, the 1973 abortion ruling that conservatives execrate as judicial overreaching. Both rulings, says J. Harvie Wilkinson, suddenly recognized a judicially enforceable right grounded in "an ambiguous constitutional text."</p>

On the last date of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 spring session, justices declared by a 5-4 decision in D.C. v. Heller that, yes, the Second Amendment does secure an individual right to keep and bear arms. With that, the high court voided the District of Columbia’s extreme regulations on gun ownership, which had amounted in practice to a complete ban on any usable weapon for self-protection, even in the home. In retrospect, D.C. v. Heller seems almost inevitable, because of shifting public and academic attitudes toward gun rights. But victory came only after a protracted struggle, with many pitfalls...

In the 1960s, when conservative legal scholars railed about an overreaching, activist Supreme Court, it was the Miranda ruling they denounced, along with its author, Republican Chief Justice Earl Warren. In the 1970s -- and '80s and '90s -- those critics directed their firepower at Roe vs. Wade and its author, Republican Justice Harry Blackmun. Now the complaint arises again. The target this time is none other than the current court's preeminent originalist, Republican Justice Antonin Scalia, and his opinion sanctioning individual gun ownership rights in District of Columbia vs. Heller. As noted by the New York Times, two eminent...

... Not all conservatives agree with the critics, of course. Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer who was a principal architect of the victorious strategy in the Heller case, rejected the comparison to Roe. ... In an interview, Professor Levinson said, “The result in Heller is eminently respectable.” But he added that he understood why some conservatives were upset. “People say the Roe court was too interventionist,” he said. “So is the Heller court from that perspective.” “In both Roe and Heller,” Judge Wilkinson wrote, “the court claimed to find in the Constitution the authority to overrule the wishes of...