Supreme Court strikes down DC’s gun ban; says Millionaire’s Amendment goes too far
In two important opinions released this morning, the Supreme Court has:
- held (by a 5-4 vote) that the 2nd Amendment creates a limited individual right to own a gun. From SCOTUSblog:
the Court nullified two provisions of the city of Washington’s strict 1976 gun control law: a flat ban on possessing a gun in one’s home, and a requirement that any gun - except one kept at a business - must be unloaded and disassembled or have a trigger lock in place. The Court said it was not passing on a part of the law requiring that guns be licensed. It said that issuing a license to a handgun owner, so the weapon can be used at home, would be a sufficient remedy for the Second Amendment violation of denying any access to a handgun.
There are several important limitations to today’s ruling:
Justice Scalia’s opinion stressed that the Court was not casting doubt on long-standing bans on carrying a concealed gun or on gun possession by felons or the mentally retarded, on laws barring guns from schools or government buildings, and laws putting conditions on gun sales.
Also — and this is quite important —
The Court took no position on whether the Second Amendment right restricts only federal government powers, or also curbs the power of states to regulate guns. In a footnote, Scalia said that the issue of “incorporating” the Second into the Fourteenth Amendment, thus applying it to the states, was “a question not presented by this case.” But the footnote said decisions in 1886 and 1894 had reaffirmed that the Amendment “applies only to the Federal Government.” Whether the Court will reopen that issue thus will depend upon future cases.
So, really, the overall effect of this opinion may be quite limited, since it sounds like strict licensure laws should not be affected. I mean, really, does DC’s extreme law banning outright the possession of guns in the home exist anywhere else? [UPDATE: A knowledgeable source informs me that Chicago also has such a ban in place.] I would assume that someone will fairly quickly challenge a strict state gun-control law in order to resolve the state/federal issue, since it remains unclear whether the 2nd Amendment applies to the states or only to the federal government (recall that Congress has legislative jurisdiction over the District of Columbia, so the state issue was not presented in today’s case). UPDATE: Sure enough, the NRA has already announced that it intends to challenge gun bans in Chicago and San Francisco.
- held (by the same 5-4 vote) that the so-called “Millionaire’s Amendment” to the campaign finance laws violates the First Amendment. The Millionaire’s Amendment basically says that if self-financed candidates for office spend above a certain amount of their own money, the usual fundraising limitations (e.g., $2,300 per individual donor) are raised — but only for their opponents. The Court held that creating an uneven fundraising situation was too great a burden on the First Amendment right to spend as much of your own money as you want on getting elected.
The 2nd Amendment case is available at this link. You can read the whole campaign finance decision here.
As always, SCOTUSblog is the place to go for thoughtful, unbiased, non-partisan commentary. Read them before you read anyone else.