Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Gun violence violates the right to safety for innocent persons. But guns can guard as much as they harm, giving means to persons to protect their bodies and lives against assailants seeking to injure or kill them.
Last week, the Supreme Court waded into the constitutional side of this debate for the first time in 12 years. In 2008, the court declared that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own a handgun and possess it in one’s home for self-defense. That decision only applied against laws made by the national government.
In 2010, the court extended that decision to states, requiring them to respect this individual right as well. However, it left much unsaid, maintaining that ample room remained for safety regulations regarding guns, but it left filling in those rules for later cases. The court took no additional cases, leaving mounting confusion as to how to balance the need for public laws protecting against gun violence and the rights of persons for self-defense in owning firearms.
That is, until this week when Justice Thomas wrote for a 6-3 majority in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc. v. Bruen. In conformity with Supreme Court precedent, New York generally permitted persons to obtain a license to possess a handgun in the home or at work. But the state made obtaining a license to possess a gun outside these confines far more difficult. A person must show a “proper cause,” which did not include general worries about crime but must be tied to “extraordinary” and “particular” threats directed at the applicant.
Predictably, few persons could attain this standard. Thus few could obtain the license to carry their firearm outside the home or office. The court now said that this requirement violated the Second Amendment.
In doing so, the court reiterated the purpose at the core of the Second Amendment. The Framers of the Constitution saw firearm possession as a means for self-defense, an extension of the right to life.
Threats to safety — and thus life — don’t occur only in the home or at an office. People often live their lives in various locations and engage in frequent travel. Their right to self-defense against violent crime extends to those places, because they remain the same persons, with the same rights, wherever they go.
The court also began to clarify its rules for weighing the claims of safety regulations and individual gun rights. Gun rights are not unlimited, and there’s room for the regulation of a person’s ownership and possession.
Yet the court now states the burden rests with the government to “demonstrate that the regulation is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation.” These demonstrations need not find exact parallels between past and present regulations given changes in circumstances and technology. But they must bear an adequate analogy to past principles and practices.
In its argument, the court stressed that it brought the protection of Second Amendment rights into line with other constitutionally protected rights. For too long, the Second Amendment had been special in not receiving similar treatment to, say, First Amendment guarantees. Now, the Court has begun to remedy that wrong.
Using these standards, the court concluded that New York went beyond its regulatory power. No historical analogs exist for denying that right outside the home or office.
In so saying, the court retained plenty of room for gun regulation. It assumed, for example, that certain types of weapons may be banned. It assumed that “sensitive places” existed wherein laws might prohibit persons from carrying guns such as schools.
And it recognized that certain persons’ actions or history might permit limits on their gun ownership in the name of safety. Moreover, the concurrence by Justice Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice Roberts, further confirmed these points.
The court made the right call, one more nuanced than many of its detractors will admit. For it sought the very balance we need in our gun debate. We mourn the tragedies our country has suffered these past months from the scourge of gun violence.
But we must recognize the constitutional parameters in addressing that menace. We must devote ourselves to the right of everyone to be safe in their person, whether at home, at work, at school, or anywhere else they go. The court sought a reasonable way for how legislators and executives can do so by means both of gun safety and gun possession. May we listen, learn, and act accordingly.
Adam Carrington is an associate professor of politics at Hillsdale College.