southchild

As “co-counsel to the plaintiffs in Parker v. District of Columbia,” Robert Levy has a unique perspective on last week’s ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit. Check out his article in today’s National Review, “Individual Ruling”. Regarding the Second Amendment’s applicability to individuals, Levy has these observations from the ruling:

According to the appellate court, activities protected by the Amendment “are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.”

In other words, the Constitution forecloses an outright ban on handguns. Ergo, if we Americans decide that a ban is required for public safety, we must change the Constitution. We cannot simply ignore the constitutional provision and act as though the document did not exist. That’s a recipe for lawlessness and mob rule. As a nation, we have chosen to have a written Constitution for good reason, and it has served us well for more than two centuries.

None of which suggests that the D.C. government is foreclosed from regulating the use and ownership of firearms. Indeed, Judge Silberman conceded that “the protections of the Second Amendment are subject to the same sort of reasonable restrictions that have been recognized as limiting, for instance, the First Amendment.”

Perhaps, said the court, D.C. could justify concealed-carry restrictions, the registration of firearms, proficiency testing, and no gun possession by felons or minors. But an across-the-board ban on all handguns, in all places, for all residents, isn’t “reasonable.”

In fact, it’s not a regulation at all; it’s an out-and-out prohibition. When America dealt with prohibition of a different sort in 1919, we implemented that ill-advised goal by amending the Constitution. And in that case, the Bill of Rights contained no express provision guaranteeing the right to consume alcoholic beverages.

Respected legal scholars across the political spectrum agree with Judge Silberman, and recognize that the Second Amendment secures an individual right, which can be limited in some circumstances. Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, a former American Civil Liberties Union board member, says he “hates” guns and wants the Second Amendment repealed. But he condemns “foolish liberals who are trying to read the Second Amendment out of the Constitution by claiming it’s not an individual right …. They’re courting disaster by encouraging others to use the same means to eliminate portions of the Constitution they don’t like.”

Harvard’s Laurence Tribe, another well-known liberal scholar, and Yale professor Akhil Amar acknowledge that there is an individual right to keep and bear arms, albeit limited by “reasonable regulation in the interest of public safety.”

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“The best we can hope for concerning the people at large is that they be properly armed.”
— Alexander Hamilton, The Federalist Papers

“One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms.”
— Joseph Story, Supreme Court Justice

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 11:33 am and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.