The Supreme Court today is hearing a case that will have profound implications on the ownership of guns.  The main issue the Court must answer is who does the Second Amendment belong to?  Does the wording create a right for individuals to own firearms or is it exclusive to a state militia like the National Guard?  During the period that the Second Amendment was written most every town had a militia, the vaunted Minute Men of the Revolutionary War.  Unlike today the state militias did not have barracks, all of the weapons were kept in each member’s home. Thus, to be able to easily say what the original meaning of the amendment was is daunting.

The case is District of Columbia v. Heller and pits a city against a private security guard who wants to own a gun.  DC’s law is the furthest reaching gun control law in the country, completely banning ownership of handguns and requiring rifles and shotguns to either be disassembled or installed with a trigger lock.  Because this is the first time in almost 70 years that the Court has heard a Second Amendment case the justices have a virtual clean slate to write on.  The Court could completely overturn the DC law, could completely uphold it, or could completely cut it down the middle.  The fact that the mid level Court of Appeals overturned the DC law will merely be a footnote in the opinion.

The city’s weakest point is the stated reason for enacting the ban in the first place.  In a statement made in 1976 to support the passage of the gun ban the DC Council stated that handguns “have no legitimate use in the purely urban environment of the District of Columbia.”  The law was created to make DC a safer city.  Yet DC was the murder capital of the world in the 1990s, with 69.3 murders per 100,000 people.  Second was Philadelphia at 27.4 murders per 100,000 people.  It is obvious that DC’s gun ban has not contributed to a safer city.

However, the Court may not look solely at crime statistics from the District or the ramifications their decision may have on DC’s law.  If the Court upholds an individual’s right to bear arms not only will DC’s law go down but many other gun control laws may as well.  If it is an individual right how much regulation of that right is tolerable?

The federal government has banned automatic weapons and instituted background checks on all weapons purchases.  If owning handguns is a right, are automatic handguns included?  The background check acts to force the purchaser to prove they are eligible to own the weapon.  When was the last time you had to prove through a waiting period that you are eligible for a right?