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Right to Bear Arms

August 15, 2011
Gun Rights and Justice Scalia’s Brush with Living Constitutionalism
by Nicole Flatow

Justice Antonin Scalia may be the Supreme Court’s “ultimate originalist,” but when it comes to the Second Amendment, he has recently embraced a living Constitution, UCLA law professor Adam Winkler suggests in a column for The Atlantic adopted from his forthcoming book, Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America.

In his article, Winkler traces the surprising and contradictory history of the U.S. right to bear arms, starting with the Founding Fathers’ own version of an “individual mandate” that required many citizens to purchase guns, while forbidding gun ownership for slaves, free blacks, and “law-abiding white men who refused to swear loyalty to the Revolution.”

The National Rifle Association, founded as an organization to improve American soldiers’ marksmanship, was “at the forefront of legislative efforts to enact gun control” in the 1920s and 1930s, and only shifted to become a “lobbying powerhouse committed to a more aggressive view of what the Second Amendment promises to citizens” in 1977, Winkler explains.

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Methods of interpretation, Originalism, Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Adam Winkler, NRA, Right to Bear Arms, Second Amendment
March 4, 2010
Supersizing the Second Amendment? (Part II)
By Adam Winkler, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. Professor Winkler signed an amicus brief filed in McDonald v. City of Chicago supporting incorporation through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

[Part I of "Supersizing the Second Amendment?" is available here.]

So why do I still say that gun control advocates are also seemed to be big winners?

Because the Justices seemed to think that, regardless of incorporation, state and local governments would retain wide leeway to enact gun control. The only words used as much as "fundamental" and "implicit in ordered liberty" in the argument were "reasonable regulation."

Numerous Justices expressed their support for the idea that the Second Amendment did not prohibit reasonable regulation of firearms. Justice Kennedy said that lawmakers still "have substantial latitude and ample authority to impose reasonable regulations." Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said that she "thought that Heller allowed for reasonable regulation." Justice Scalia didn't use that catchphrase, but went out of his way to say that Heller "was very careful not to impose" severe limits on the federal government "precisely because it realized that" gun violence "is a national problem."

There are two ways to think about "reasonable regulation." The first is what I've long endorsed: the Second Amendment should be governed by the formal "reasonable regulation" standard uniformly used in state constitutional law. Forty-two states have constitutional protections for the individual right to bear arms and all of them apply a deferential standard by this name. Under that test, any regulation will be allowed to stand so long as it doesn't effectively destroy or nullify the individual's right to have a gun for self-defense. Some types of weapons can be banned so long as individuals have access to others. Applying this test, almost all gun control survives.

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Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Criminal Justice, Adam Winkler, D.C. v. Heller, Fourteenth Amendment, Incorporation, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice Antonin Scalia, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, McDonald v. Chicago, Reasonable Regulation, Right to Bear Arms, Second Amendment
March 3, 2010
Supersizing the Second Amendment? (Part I)
By Adam Winkler, Professor of Law, UCLA School of Law. Professor Winkler signed an amicus brief filed in McDonald v. City of Chicago supporting incorporation through the Privileges or Immunities Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Yesterday, the Supreme Court heard oral argument in the latest big gun case, McDonald v. City of Chicago. The Court will decide whether the individual right to keep and bear arms recognized in 2008's D.C. v. Heller extends to the states. I was at oral argument and there seemed to be two big winners: gun rights advocates and gun control advocates.

The gun rights folks, like the NRA, seemed poised to win the case. Of the five Justices who voted with the majority in Heller, all appeared to be inclined to hold that the right to bear arms is a "fundamental" right such that it applies to state laws. (Well, not all of the five: Justice Clarence Thomas said nothing, extending his streak of silent oral arguments that dates back to 2006.)

Just like in the Heller oral argument, Justice Anthony Kennedy, the swing vote, showed his cards. "If [the right to bear arms is] not fundamental, then Heller is wrong, it seems to me." Chief Justice John Roberts said, "I don't see how you can read Heller and not take away from it the notion that the Second Amendment, whether you want to label it fundamental or not, was extremely important to the framers in their view of what liberty meant."

As Paul Clement, representing the NRA said, the question of whether the right to bear arms was fundamental or not was "remarkably straightforward." The fact that Clement was there at all was a surprise. The NRA was not formally a party to the suit. More striking still was that Clement was representing the NRA. After Clement, then serving as Solicitor General, filed a brief in Heller suggesting that D.C.'s handgun ban might be constitutional, gun rights activists branded him a traitor. Now he is their lawyer.

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Supreme Court, Constitutional Interpretation and Change, Criminal Justice, Adam Winkler, Chief Justice John Roberts, D.C. v. Heller, Fourteenth Amendment, Fundamental Rights, Incorporation, Justice Anthony Kennedy, Justice John Paul Stevens, McDonald v. Chicago, Paul Clement, Right to Bear Arms, Second Amendment

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