A short two days after release of the US Supreme Court's decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, gun rights activists are already lining up at the courthouse, seeking to overturn existing legislation providing for blanket bans on private gun ownership. The New York Times provides a story this morning on the first such lawsuit apparently to arise in this connection. We incorporate a few key story paragraphs below:
SAN FRANCISCO — Using the new judicial muscle provided by the Supreme Court’s affirmation of the right to bear arms, the National Rifle Association and another pro-gun group sued San Francisco and its housing authority on Friday to invalidate a ban on handguns in public housing.In the months (and years) to come, we'll inevitably see a flood of litigation in America, as gun rights activists battle government public policy makers and regulators in the courts, to determine the boundaries of the "individual" Second Amendment constitutional protections recognised in the Thurday's High Court decision.
But officials here and in other cities where gun restrictions are now being challenged took a defiant stance. As the lawsuit was being filed, San Francisco officials held a news conference in the city’s hardscrabble Western Addition neighborhood to announce a series of antigun measures. Mayor Gavin Newsom said the timing was coincidental, but apt.
Mr. Newsom, who said he suspected that the rifle association might also sue to overturn a local ordinance requiring trigger-locks, challenged N.R.A. officials to come to his city and spend time in public housing developments, which he said were often overrun with weapons.
“We don’t happen to believe that it’s good public policy in public housing sites where guns and violence is the highest in our city and, for that matter, respectively, in cities across America, to say ‘Hey, come on in; let’s everybody get guns,’ ” said Mr. Newsom, a Democrat.
Our own Thursday article on the topic generated considerable web traffic, making it obvious to us that our gentle WCF readers were quite interested in the implications of the Heller decision.
It's for those readers that we've hunted down this most excellent blog article, from the SCOTUS Blog, entitled "DC v. Heller Round-Up." We hope our resident Second Amendment watchers will appreciate and find useful the considerable array of articles which are compiled and linked from the site. It kept your humble blogmeister (a Second Amendment advocate himself) occupied this morning for several hours.
Comments are invited, as always.
Don't hesitate to chip in your own two-bits.
1 comment:
Now that I've read excerpts of Scalia's majority ruling, I'm hurrying down to Smith & Edwards to buy some plutonium.
I have the knowhow to make a small nuclear weapon, just a few kilotons for my own personal defense.
You see, my nuclear weapon is an "instrument that constitutes [a] bearable arms, even those that were not in existence at the time of the founding."
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