UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT HOLDS THAT THE SECOND AMENDMENT GRANTS
AMERICANS AN INDIVIDUAL RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
By: Brian Niemczyk
"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."
-- U.S. Constitution, Second Amendment
In District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court, for the first time in over 200 years, authoritatively ruled upon the meaning of these words. In a nutshell, the Court ruled that the Second Amendment provides each American citizen with an individual right to keep and bear arms, and that this right serves to invalidate Washington, D.C.'s handgun ban. This ruling, which has resolved a long-running debate among constitutional scholars and judges, will have a wide-ranging and unpredictable impact upon federal, state and local gun control laws, including Minnesota's recently-enacted "Conceal-Carry" law.
I. What Did the Heller Court Actually Decide?
The gun control law being challenged in Heller was enacted decades ago by the city of Washington, D.C. in response to an upswing in the local violent crime rate. Essentially, the law made it nearly impossible for D.C. residents to lawfully own handguns. They were subject to an extremely restrictive licensing regime and, if a citizen somehow managed to obtain a license to own a gun, the law still required (with minor exceptions) guns to be "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device." The result was that even the very few who could lawfully obtain a firearm could not, as a practical matter, use that firearm for self defense within their home.
In Heller, the Court found that this law violated the Second Amendment. Relying on a complex and lengthy analysis of the original intent of the framers in drafting the Amendment, the Court (in a decision by Justice Antonin Scalia) ruled that the Second Amendment protected individuals from these sorts of overly-restrictive gun control measures by the government. In so doing, the Court resolved a long-running debate concerning the true intent of the framers on this issue. According to the opposing school of thought, the Second Amendment was nothing more than a "collective right" of various state and local militias not to be disarmed by the federal government. According to this theory, since state and local militias (at least as they were understood by the framers) no longer exist, the Amendment has no continuing role in modern America. This view was advanced by Justice Stevens' dissent in the Heller case.
By a 5-4 vote, the Supreme Court rejected this view, holding instead that the framers had intended the Second Amendment to protect an individual's right to own and carry weapons. In interpreting the meaning of the unusual language and grammar in the Amendment, the Court drew upon a wide variety of historical sources, including English antecedents, public pronouncements by the framers themselves, early state constitutional provisions, early commentaries by American legal scholars and dictionaries from the founding era. Applying this understanding of the Second Amendment, the Court found that D.C.'s handgun ban failed to survive constitutional scrutiny, as it essentially barred law-abiding citizens from using handguns for the proper and legal purpose of defending their homes and families.
Near the end of the Court's decision, it attempts to clarify the limited scope of its ruling, stating: "[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited." For example, the Court specifies that its decision should not "be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions" such as denying of weapons to felons and the mentally ill, banning firearms in schools and other "sensitive places," restricting the commercial sale of weapons, or prohibiting unusually dangerous weapons (i.e., machine guns, bazookas, high-tech military weaponry, etc.). These restrictions (or their close analogues) were known to the framers and as such are incorporated into the Court's understanding of the Second Amendment's scope.
As he so often does, Justice Scalia concludes his opinion with a flourish:
We are aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country, and we take seriously the concerns raised by the many amici who believe that prohibition of handgun ownership is a solution. The Constitution leaves the District of Columbia a variety of tools for combating that problem, including some measures regulating handguns... 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.
II. What Impact Will the Heller Decision Have on Minnesota's Gun Control Laws?
So, what effect will this ruling have on the rights of gun owners in Minnesota? In the short term, very little. As you are probably aware, the Minnesota legislature in recent years enacted the law popularly known as the "Conceal-Carry Act." Essentially, this law allows Minnesotans to own and carry handguns, so long as they are able to pass a background check and certify that they have received certain training in the safe use of firearms. This law was essentially written by pro-gun advocates, and as such contains only minimal restrictions on gun ownership - certainly, it in no way resembles the almost total ban on handgun ownership which was struck down in Heller. As such, it is unlikely to be (successfully) challenged using the Second Amendment analysis set forth in Heller.
In addition, the Heller ruling, by its terms, applies the Second Amendment only to gun laws enacted under the authority of the federal government. The question of whether the Second Amendment can be directly applied to laws passed by state governments was not before the Court in Heller and hence was not decided. However, since many state and local governments have gun control laws equivalent to the Washington, D.C. law struck down by the Court, it will only be a matter of time before a Second Amendment challenge to a state law is before the Court. At that time, it will need to decide, applying complex concepts involving questions of federalism and the "incorporation" of the Bill of Rights into the Fourteenth Amendment, whether the Second Amendment can serve as a limit on state gun control laws.
In that future case, if the Court does ultimately find that the reasoning in Heller applies to state gun control laws, Minnesota's Conceal-Carry law might conceivably face such a challenge, and parts of it could potentially be found to be unduly restrictive of the newly-minted individual right to keep and bear arms. Unless and until that happens, Minnesota's gun control laws will be unaffected by the Supreme Court's Heller decision. So, while the decision is undoubtedly an important milestone in the history of Second Amendment and gun control jurisprudence, its immediate impact on gun-owning Minnesotans will likely be minimal.
Brian Niemczyk is an associate attorney at Mansfield, Tanick & Cohen, P.A., concentrating in the areas of real estate, commercial, and employment litigation. In law school, he was the symposium editor for the Hamline Law Review and in that position organized a 2006 scholarly symposium entitled "Gun Control and the Second Amendment."
