US right to bear arms on trial
Independent Weekly, Page: 11. Saturday, 15 March, 2008
For the first time in 70 years, the US Supreme Court will take on the question of whether individual Americans have the right to keep and bear arms or whether it is a collective right of the people for service in a state militia.
That question is at the heart of a long, impassioned debate about how much power the Government has to keep people from owning guns and it could soon be decided by the US Supreme Court in a case about one of the nation’s strictest gun control laws.
Set for arguments on March 18 and with a decision expected by late June, America’s highest court could resolve once and for all the much-disputed meaning of the Second Amendment of the US Constitution.
Written 219 years ago, the amendment says, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed”.
Few constitutional law issues have triggered more scholarly debate and historical research on whether the Constitution’s authors intended to guarantee an individual right or a collective right tied to service in a state-regulated militia, like today’s National Guard.
The arguments follow a series of mass shootings in the past year multiple killings on at least three college campuses, two shopping centres and one Missouri town meeting. If the court finds it is an individual right, gun control advocates fear it could place in jeopardy not only the ban on private handgun ownership in the US capital at issue in the case, but also other laws around the country regulating and restricting private possession of firearms.
The Supreme Court’s last review of the Second Amendment came in a five page discussion in an opinion issued nearly 70 years ago that failed to definitively resolve the constitutional issue. That could change when the justices consider whether a 32-year-old Washington, DC, law banning private possession of handguns violates the Second Amendment rights of people unaffiliated with any state-regulated militia.
Former top US Justice Department officials including former attorney-general Janet Reno, law professors, linguistic experts and historians have all argued the Second Amendment protects the right of people only to keep arms for militia service.
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