Justices expected to make right call

The News Virginian / News Virginian
Published: March 18, 2008

Handicapping Supreme Court decisions is always a precarious enterprise, particularly on an issue as volatile as gun control, but by all accounts it appears that justices are poised to preserve the individual right to bear arms. How precisely that will impact gun restrictions will not be known until the high court issues a decision on the historic case heard Tuesday.
Lawyers argued before the court as hundreds of sign-toting protesters and gun backers milled about outside the court building. The drama began to unfold a year ago when a lower court declared unconstitutional a 30-year-old Washington, D.C., gun ban.

At issue is whether the Second Amendment provision for the right to bear arms should be interpreted as an individual right or a collective one for "a well regulated militia," meaning, in other words, that people may bear arms only as part of a militia.
Few legal experts expect the conservative-leaning court to take the latter view, despite arguments heard yesterday pointing to gun violence in the capital, where there were 143 gun deaths last year. A more telling statistic: 135 people were killed in firearms violence in 1976, the year the D.C. gun ban was enacted. The law, in other words, accomplishes nothing.
The national homicide rate - about 15,000 annually - is a national disgrace, to be sure. Guns are almost invariably the weapons of choice. But those who insist that gun bans like the one in D.C. are an answer are woefully and perhaps willfully misguided. Those who kill using guns - like those who kill by some other means - trample the law on their way to the ultimate crime. In many cases, killers have obtained firearms illegally and are in the process of committing other crimes.
Stripping people of their legal right to arm themselves against those who care little for the law to begin with would only create more defenseless victims.

Nonetheless, this does not ease the court's dilemma. The founders were concerned about oppressors, not burglars or attackers on urban streets. That is why interpreting the Second Amendment against the backdrop of modernity produces a legal quandary.

Still, no matter how muddled the debate, the spirit of the Second Amendment seems plain. Those who prowl the back alleys and byways of our cities and towns looking to do others harm pose a tyranny all their own. The Second Amendment, we believe, affords innocents the right to defend themselves against criminal as well as imperial oppression.

It also states that the right to bear arms should not be "unreasonably infringed." That raises a whole new array of questions about 'reasonable' restrictions, which appears to be the real mystery regarding how the court will interpret the law in a decision expected in June. The D.C. gun ban in its absolute nature and its almost absolute inefficacy was anything but reasonable.

The court is expected to take that position. We believe it is the right one.