Gun ruling to spark legal battles nationwide

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court’s ruling that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting was the opening shot in what will be a long legal and legislative battle over exactly how strictly cities and states can regulate firearms, advocates and elected officials said Thursday.

The court’s 5-4 ruling, its first ever addressing the core ambiguity of the Second Amendment, upheld an appeals court ruling that struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns.

The decision went further than even the Bush administration had sought, but it probably leaves most firearms laws intact. It also struck down Washington’s requirement that firearms be equipped with trigger locks or kept disassembled, but it left intact the licensing of guns, and it upheld longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons or the mentally ill.

It will take several weeks for the court’s opinion to work its way into local and state laws. Until then, Washington’s ban remains on the books, and city officials promised swift action to rework their law to strictly regulate handguns while complying with the ruling.

“Unfortunately and disappointingly, the Supreme Court opted not to uphold the three-decade-old handgun ban in the District of Columbia,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said.

“More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence,” he said. “It is important to both respect the court’s authority and then to act quickly.”

Fenty gave the police department 21 days to develop a system for citizens to register lawful handguns in their homes. The city’s attorney general said rules on who could apply for gun licenses would not change — applicants would still be required to be mentally competent adults, and they would still be fingerprinted.

Pro-gun activists claim major victory
Advocates for gun rights quickly declared the ruling a landmark victory and said they would seek to strike down gun regulations across the country.

“This is a great moment in American history,” said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of the National Rifle Association.

In a statement, the White House said: “The president strongly agrees with the Supreme Court’s historic decision today that the Second Amendment protects the individual right of Americans to keep and bear arms. This has been the administration’s long-held view. The president is also pleased that the Court concluded that the D.C. firearm laws violate that right.”

Gun-control advocates, acknowledging the decision as a defeat, pointed to language in the 5-to-4 ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, upholding “reasonable” restrictions as their basis for defending gun laws wherever they could.

“After the ... ruling, as before, approximately 80 Americans will continue to die from guns every day,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “Our weak or nonexistent gun laws contribute to the thousands of senseless gun deaths and injuries in this country that occur each year.”

But, Helmke said, “it’s clear that what the court did today is they limited the extremes. You can no longer have near-total prohibitions on guns, but reasonable restrictions on guns.”

NRA to take battle to states
LaPierre said the NRA would use decision as “the opening salvo in a step-by-step process” to dismantle gun regulations in cities across the country. He said the NRA would begin with lawsuits in San Francisco and in Chicago and several of its suburbs.

Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, which has suffered a recent spate of gun violence affecting everyone from schoolchildren and teachers to the elderly, fervently criticized the ruling, calling it “a very frightening decision” that was incongruent with the Supreme Court’s own security policies.

“You can’t carry a gun into the Supreme Court,” Daley said. “You can’t carry a gun in and around the Capitol building. You can’t get into a capital building without being searched,” Daley said. “So why should the streets of our American cities be open to someone carrying a gun?

“Why can’t you stand outside the Supreme Court with a gun and say, ‘This is my constitutional right?’” he asked.

Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the other likely target state of the NRA’s first efforts, also criticized the ruling.

“I believe the people of this great country will be less safe because of it,” she said.

Court addresses historical ambiguity
At the heart of the decision was the court’s intention to clarify an amendment that has sown confusion since it was ratified in 1791.

The amendment reads: “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.”

The basic issue for the justices was to decide exactly what those commas mean: Does the amendment protect an individual’s right to own guns no matter what, or is that right somehow tied to service in a state militia?

Scalia said an individual right to bear arms was supported by “the historical narrative” both before and after the Second Amendment was adopted.

The Constitution does not permit “the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home,” Scalia said.

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority “would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.”

He said such evidence “is nowhere to be found.”

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