One Heller of a Ride

Today, the US Supreme Court will end its term with one of the most awaited cases to come down in a long time. District of Columbia v. Heller presents the Court with an opportunity to revisit the meaning of the Second Amendment. The question can be boiled down as whether the District of Columbia can restrict the rights of individuals who are not members of a militia to own guns in their homes for their private use.

The decision is expected to be handed down at 10AM EDT.

UPDATE:
According to Tom Goldstein at ScotusBlog:

The Court has released the opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller (07-290), on whether the District’s firearms regulations – which bar the possession of handguns and require shotguns and rifles to be kept disassembled or under trigger lock – violate the Second Amendment. The ruling below, which struck down the provisions in question, is affirmed.


Justice Scalia wrote the opinion. Justice Breyer dissented, joined by Justices Stevens, Souter and Ginsburg. We will provide a link to the decision as soon as it is available.

UPDATE:
The 157 page case, including syllabus and dissents, can be found here.

UPDATE:
I'm still reading through the case, but Scalia drops nothing but heaping scorn on Breyer's separate dissent from pp. 59 through 64. Indeed, Scalia notes that Breyer misreads the law, tries to apply laws designed to keep homes safe from a fire threat (keeping gunpowder in a home could pose a fire/explosion risk back in Colonial days), and a single law from a single jurisdiction in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary to claim that the right to bear arms is not an individual right and restrictions imposed by DC were reasonable.

From Scalia:

But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home. Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct.

UPDATE:
So, how will this apply to states and cities? That's a question certainly floating around right now. According to the majority, the question of incorporation is an open one. It wasn't being decided by this case, which means that state laws and city laws may find themselves subject to suit along the same lines as Heller and may eventually wind up at the Court for determination. See the footnote on page 48:

With respect to Cruikshank's continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the First Amendment did not apply against the States and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases. Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, and Miller v. Texas, reaffirmed that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government.

It appears that Scalia was intent upon restricting the decision to the matter at hand - the constitutionality of the laws of the District of Columbia and the federal government. The issue of laws imposed by states and their jurisdictions remains an open one.

Some states and cities may move to adjust their laws according to Heller. Cities to watch for responses - New York City and Chicago, which have both been home to gun control advocates in the form of Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Daley. Bloomberg's statement on Heller notes that the case puts to rest the issue of the right to bear arms, but leaves open the question of getting guns out of the hands of criminals.

"Today's decision by the Supreme Court upholding those rights will benefit our coalition by finally putting to rest the ideological debates that have for too long obscured an obvious fact: criminals, who have no right to purchase or possess guns, nevertheless have easy access to them," he said in a written statement.

"Mayors and police chiefs have a responsibility to crack down on illegal guns and punish gun criminals, and it is encouraging that the Supreme Court recognizes the constitutionality of reasonable regulations that allow for us to carry out those responsibilities."

Meanwhile, I think some gun control advocates may be putting the cart before the horse:

In New Jersey, a gun control advocate says the ruling does not threaten the state's tough firearms laws.

Ceasefire NJ executive director Bryan Miller notes that the high court on Thursday also affirmed licensing and registration for weapons.

Miller says the ruling means that any new challenge to New Jersey's assault weapon ban would fail.

The state firearm laws were not at issue in the ruling, so there's no change for now. If the state laws end up in the Court, the most restrictive of those laws may end up like the DC ban on handguns - found unconstitutional as violative of the Second Amendment.