Acting again on a narrow and harshly divided 5-4 opinion, the conservative majority of the U.S. Supreme Court ruled Monday that the federal Second Amendment gun rights it asserted two years ago must be protected under state and local laws, as well. Under this interpretation, the majority ruled that Chicago’s 1983 ban on handguns is unconstitutional.
The ruling will cheer those who keep pressing to gratuitously intrude guns into the public sphere. But it is thoughtlessly and maddeningly reckless, again, in its lack of precision and definition of citizens’ rights to bear arms.
In upending Chicago’s handgun ban, for example, the court declared again — as it did in the related Heller gun case two years ago — that states and local governments still possess the right to enact reasonable regulation on the use and carrying of guns in public places. Indeed, the five justices in the majority on Monday mainly just extended the same Second Amendment right, and caveats, that they noted in 2008 in the Heller case, which struck down a similar ban on possession of handguns in Washington, D.C., a uniquely federal jurisdiction.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, reiterated those caveats in the case at hand. As in Heller, he wrote that the court did not intend to undermine state and local laws that prohibited gun rights, for example, to felons and the mentally ill; or that forbid possession of guns in sensitive public places like schools and government buildings; or to forbid laws regulating commercial sales of firearms. All of these areas would be subject to state and local regulation, as well as federal regulation, the majority ruled.
The court, however, offered no guidelines in any of these areas. That leaves the nation subject to waves of future lawsuits from advocates or critics of local and state gun laws, while gun violence plays out.
There is ample reason now for the court to fix such ground rules. States and cities that contend with rampant gun-related crime and violence still want and need to regulate where, how and by whom guns may be sold and carried in public places.
Yet the court’s majority has oddly declined to delineate what constitutes reasonable regulation. In the void, state legislatures, including Tennessee’s, have pushed a National Rifle Association agenda of allowing gun-carry for permit holders in bars and restaurants, schools and churches, state and parks and employer-provider parking places, and in favor of an expanding array of firearms subject to ready purchase by citizens.
In the meantime, gun violence nationally continues to mount. More than 60,000 people are killed or injured by firearms in America every year, dissenting justices noted in Monday’s ruling. Police officers, moreover, are growing more afraid of encountering heavy-duty firearms and related equipment that once were available only to the nation’s military: i.e., assault rifles, machine guns, semi-automatic (and easily modified to automatic) handguns and rifles, as well as bullet-proof vestments, armor-piercing shells and night-vision goggles.
It is hard to imagine that the Second Amendment could be interpreted to authorize Americans access to such high-technology guns, munitions and permutation of force. Certainly the founding fathers who wrote the Bill of Rights hardly could have conceived the evolution of weapons and firearms equipment that rabid gun-rights groups now embrace.
Regardless, the current Supreme Court majority has facilitated this leap by overturning long-settled precedents which posited Second Amendment rights as a group right in accordance with the first phrase of the amendment, which states: “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.”
Now that they’ve twice decided the second half of the amendment is paramount, that Second Amendment guns rights are personal individual rights unrelated to state militias, the court’s activist radicals should say precisely how well-regulated our potential militia should be to achieve the security of a free state. The longer the court is mute on this issue, the more lawsuits we will see on these issues, and the longer blood will flow from easy access to more powerful guns.