The Supreme Court of The United States today (6/26/08) decreed something that was obvious for the first 154 years of the country’s history: The Second Amendment recognizes an INDIVIDUAL right to keep and bear arms. In their decision on District Of Columbia v. Heller, the Supremes ruled 5 to 4 that Washington D.C.’s 32 year old handgun ban is unconstitutional. This is a huge victory for the Libertarian belief that we as individuals ultimately are responsible for our own safety and self-defense. It also reinforces the reasoning of The Founders who put the Second Amendment in to the Bill Of Rights: the government should not hold a monopoly on the means of lethal force; and only an armed citizenry can prevent even the most benevolent government from turning tyrannical.
The argument that the Second Amendment only protected the states from federal limitations on firearms for state militias was first mentioned in the early 19th century, but did not gain any support until after World War I, as an opportunistic reaction to England’s first gun control measures. Up until that point, all American citizens and governments (and most but not all courts) understood that the Second Amendment recognized that individuals had a right to own and carry weapons. Of course, that was a time when everyone understood what the definition of is” was.
England instituted gun control laws in 1920, after World War I, out of fear that European Socialists would act out their rhetoric about overthrowing the government. As always, the impetus for gun control was the government’s fear of its citizens. Demonstrating the slippery slope theory, it took only 77 years before England completely outlawed private ownership of handguns and severely limited the ability to own rifles and shotguns.
American gun control began in the slavery South in an unapologetic effort to keep Negroes from owning guns. The twisted reasoning of the notorious Dred Scott decision in 1856 was this: If slaves or even freed Blacks were citizens, they would have all the rights of citizens including the right to keep and bear arms; and since slave era America couldn’t abide that, the US Supreme Court ruled therefore that Blacks were not citizens. Reconstruction era Jim Crow laws also were designed to disarm Blacks, but this was not merely a southern phenomenon; the US Supreme Court created the “incorporation” doctrine in the 1875 Cruikshank decision specifically to allow the states to continue to withhold all Bill Of Rights rights from Blacks, particularly the right to own guns.
The effort at general civilian gun control in America began in the outrage after the Valentine’s Day Massacre involving rival crime gangs in Chicago in 1929. The result was the National Firearms Act of 1934 which severely limited the private ownership of machine guns. The assassinations of JFK in 1963 and of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King five years later led to the Gun Control Act of 1968. Gun control slowly increased, peaking in the Bill Clinton presidency with the Brady Law in 1993 and the so-called assault weapon ban the next year.
However, the result of those pieces of legislation was the electoral overthrow of Democrat majorities in both houses of Congress in November, 1994. President Clinton later acknowledged that gun rights were the deciding issue in that election. In 2004 the assault weapon ban lapsed, and there was not the political will to reauthorize it.
While today’s Heller decision will not eradicate gun control, it has definitively ruled that the Federal Government can not ban an entire class of firearm. Because the District of Columbia is owned and operated by the Feds, Chicago and New York City will claim the decision has no effect on their gun laws. While it would seem that the 14th Amendment would overrule their smug assertions, today’s Heller decision did not add the Second Amendment to the incorporation doctrine. Unfortunately it will take additional lawsuits before we learn what the right to keep and bear arms means in the states.
Meanwhile, we in Georgia enjoy freedom-friendly gun laws, including shall-issue concealed weapons permits, widespread reciprocity of those permits with other states, and the “castle doctrine” that permits a person to defend his property and himself without having first to retreat. The Libertarian ideal exists only in two states, Vermont and Alaska, where a citizen does not need the permission of the state to own or carry a concealed weapon.
