Federal Judiciary

New pleas for gun rights

By Akin Gump Supreme Court Practice Group

The final briefs seeking to shape the Supreme Court’s coming decision on the reach of the Second Amendment’s protection of gun rights suggested Friday that states might be free to violate other parts of the Bill of Rights, if too narrow a view is taken of the constitutional liberties that state and local governments must respect.  If gun rights are singled out as the only constitutional rights unshielded from states, counties, and cities, then no other rights are safe, according to the new briefs.

A group of Chicago and Illinois defenders of the “right to keep and bear arms,” along with the National Rifle Association, filed closing briefs to answer a Dec. 30 filing by the city of Chicago and the village of Oak Park, Ill., that had urged the Supreme Court to leave state and local governments out of coverage of the Second Amendment.  The petitioners’ reply brief is here, and the NRA’s is here.  The combined Chicago-Oak Park merits brief is here.

The case of McDonald, et al., v. Chicago, et al. (08-1521) tests whether the Court will limit the reach of the Second Amendment to federal laws, or those passed for the District of Columbia, or will extend it to limit gun control laws at the state and local level.  The Second Amendment remains one of the few provisions of the Bill of Rights that remain unextended to states, counties, and cities.

Chicago and Oak Park contended that broadening the Second Amendment’s scope should be avoided, because this would intrude deeply on state and local governments’ powers to defend their citizens from gun violence.  The right to keep and bear arms, that brief argued, was a unique provision in the social risks it poses. 

Replying, the McDonald and NRA reply briefs asserted that the method of interpretation that Chicago and Oak Park would have the Court apply could just as easily undercut the Court’s past series of rulings requiring state and local governments to obey other clauses in the Bill of Rights.  if the Chicago-Oak Park test were correct, all of those prior rulings were wrong, and there is hardly another right that would not be swept away at the state and local level.

The Court is scheduled to hear oral argument on the issue on March 2.

Full post as published by SCOTUSBLOG on January 30, 2010 (boomark / email).