Legal challenges to the 2nd Amendment

The latest news from nobama is to restrict or eliminate automatic weapons. Then only the criminals will have them, great.

Thought I would start this to centralize the legal cases. Maybe some fishermen might help the NRA out, or join the NRA in understanding that all of our civil rights are being trampled, hunting and fishing. I hope the links are all right, if not mods please delete them.

http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/proj...w/beararms.htm

The Second Amendment
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.


The meaning of the Second Amendment depends upon who you talk to. The National Rifle Association, which has the Second Amendment (minus the militia clause) engraved on its headquarters building in Washington, insists that the Amendment guarantees the right of individuals to possess and carry a wide variety of firearms.

Advocates of gun control contend that the Amendment was only meant to guarantee to States the right to operate militias. The Supreme Court could easily resolve this debate, but ever since the cryptic decision of U. S. vs. Miller in 1939, the Court has ducked the issue.

Miller is subject to two possible interpretations. One, that the Second Amendment is an individual right, but that the right only extends to weapons commonly used in militias (the defendants in Miller were transporting sawed-off shotguns). The second--broader--view of Miller is that the Amendment guarantees no rights to individuals at all.

There is also a second open question concerning the Second Amendment: If it does create a right of individuals to own firearms, is the right enforceable against state regulation as well as against federal regulation? In 1876, the Supreme Court said the right--if it existed--was enforceable only against the federal government, but there's been a wholesale incorporation of Bill of Rights provisions into the 14th Amendment since then, and it's not clear that the Court would come to the same conclusion today. In Quilici vs Morton Grove, a case involving a challenge to a Chicago suburb's ban on the possession of handguns, the Seventh Circuit concluded that the right was not enforceable against the states.

In 2007, the D. C. Court of Appeals, in Parker v District of Columbia, struck down a Washington, D.C. ban on individuals having handguns in their homes. With its 2 to 1 ruling, the D. C. Circuit became the nation's second court of appeals (following the Fifth Circuit) to find that the Second Amendment creates an individual right to own firearms. Most other circuits courts had concluded the Second Amendment protects only the rights of states to maintain militias. The split in the circuits suggested that the time was finally be ripe for another Supreme Court decision on the issue. The Supreme Court granted cert in the fall of 2007 (the case has been re-named District of Columbia v Heller) and a decision is expected in June 2008.