Gun-rights supporters and organizations are supporting a legal effort to convince the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that says individuals don’t have a constitutional right to own a gun.
At issue is an appeal filed Thursday in federal court by a group of California residents who had previously sued the state over its ban of high-powered weapons. The Associated Press reported that the list of plaintiffs want the high court to overturn the earlier appeals court decision that essentially ruled the Second Amendment only guarantees the “collective” right that applies not to persons but to a state’s militia.
Included in the plaintiff’s list is a parole officer, a SWAT police officer, a recipient of the military’s Purple Heart (awarded for wounds in battle), a stockbroker and a former Marine sniper, AP said.
The Supreme Court has not addressed the Second Amendment in nearly seven decades. A spate of rulings in the 1800s made a mess of the issue, plaintiffs say, and in 1939 – the last time the high court ruled on the issue of gun rights – justices upheld the constitutionality of the National Firearms Act of 1934.
Another reason plaintiffs and supporters are seeking U.S. Supreme Court review of gun rights is because there are conflicting U.S. appeals court rulings on the Second Amendment’s intent.
The 9th circuit – the most-overturned court on the U.S. circuit court roster – ruled the amendment a right of states, but the more conservative 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans has ruled that the Constitution clearly allows for individual ownership of firearms.
“We conclude … that [previous Supreme Court cases] do not support the government’s collective rights or sophisticated collective rights approach to the Second Amendment,” a three-judge panel of the 5th circuit wrote in October 2001.
“There is no evidence in the text of the Second Amendment, or any other part of the Constitution, that the words ‘the people’ have a different connotation within the Second Amendment than when employed elsewhere in the Constitution,” the panel said. “In fact, the text of the Constitution, as a whole, strongly suggests that the words ‘the people’ have precisely the same meaning within the Second Amendment as without.”
Also, President Bush has publicly supported an individual’s right to own a firearm. And the Justice Department, under Attorney General John Ashcroft, has interpreted the Second Amendment as a right reserved to individuals.
“There is no academic research that shows that the California ban, the various state bans or the federal law have significantly reduced … violent crime rates,” legal scholar and noted gun-rights author John Lott told WorldNetDaily. “Yet, if anything happened, the California ban appears to have actually been associated with more crime. The biggest impact of the ban seems to be on reducing the number of gun shows.”
Angel Shamaya, executive director of gun-rights website KeepAndBearArms.com, says he hopes the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case and is confident justices will side with what he says is the amendment’s true intent – a support of individual rights.
Shamaya told WorldNetDaily his organization has been backing the appeal of the 9th circuit’s decision.
“It’s a true Second Amendment case,” he said. “We not only deeply implore the justices to agree to hear the case, we believe we will win the case because of how well it’s argued.
“Millions of innocent people live under the threat of criminal prosecution and prison for merely exercising their constitutional rights,” he added. “That’s about as unAmerican as it gets. It’s unacceptable, and we grew weary of waiting around for ‘someone else’ to get the job done.”
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, a 300,000-strong gun-rights group based in Springfield, Va., sounded a more cautionary tone.
“The Supreme Court is an unpredictable institution. They are increasingly making decisions based on ’emerging feelings’ and ‘criticism of laws,'” he told WorldNetDaily. “References to the Constitution are sporadic, almost accidental. As the recent Texas sodomy case shows, they only respect their own previous decisions when it suits them.
“Having said that,” Pratt continued, “the same court that presently sits opined in 1991 that the phrase ‘the people,’ as in ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms,’ refers to individuals. They found that the phrase was used to refer to individuals throughout the Bill of Rights. So, if they were consistent, they would rule that the Second Amendment means what the founders meant, which was to protect the individual right to keep and bear arms from the United States government.”
Lott says less restrictive gun rights are directly tied to public safety, according to his research, a point he says justices should consider if they agree to hear the case.
“If the court is going to consider such a ban and the court puts any weight on this being an individual right, presumably it is necessary to show that the ban is ‘narrowly tailored’ to accomplish a publicly-policy goal, such as reducing crime,” said Lott, a resident legal scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
“Yet, there is no empirical evidence that the California law accomplished this goal. The weight of the empirical evidence seems to require that the court strike down the law.”
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Second Amendment petition sent to Ashcroft
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