Comment: We should read between the lines in this “victory.” This decision was way too close on what should be 9-0 every time. The Second Amendment is a right, not a privilege.
By Robert Barnes
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, June 28, 2010; 2:40 PM
The Supreme Court ruled for the first time Monday that the Second Amendment provides all Americans a fundamental right to bear arms, a long-sought victory for gun rights advocates who have chafed at federal, state and local efforts to restrict gun ownership.
The court was considering a restrictive handgun law in Chicago and one of its suburbs that was similar to the District law that it ruled against in 2008. The 5 to 4 decision does not strike any other gun control measures currently in place, but it provides a legal basis for challenges across the country where gun owners think that government has been too restrictive.
“It is clear that the Framers . . . counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty,” Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the conservatives on the court.
The victory might be more symbolic than substantive, at least initially. Few cities have laws as restrictive as those in Chicago and Washington.
Alito said government can restrict gun ownership in certain instances but did not elaborate on what those would be. That will be determined in future litigation.
Alito said the court had made clear in its 2008 decision that it was not casting doubt on such long-standing measures as keeping felons and the mentally ill from possessing guns or keeping guns out of “sensitive places” such as schools and government buildings.
“We repeat those assurances here,” Alito wrote. “Despite municipal respondents’ doomsday proclamations, [the decision] does not imperil every law regulating firearms.”
The decision came on the final day of the term and at a time of great change for the court. Justice John Paul Stevens sat at the mahogany bench for the last time, and will end more than 34 years on the court when his retirement becomes official Tuesday. Confirmation hearings for Solicitor General Elena Kagan, President Obama‘s choice to replace Stevens, were scheduled to begin Monday afternoon.
And Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, 77, was with the court despite the death of her husband of 56 years, Martin D. Ginsburg, on Sunday.
Besides the decision in McDonald v. Chicago, the court completed its work by issuing opinions in its final cases of the term:
— It ruled that the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, an independent board set up by the 2002 Sarbanes-Oxley Act in the aftermath of the huge corporate failures of Enron, WorldCom and others, is unconstitutional. The board was designed to provide much tougher regulation of the auditing of public companies than under previous regimes, but the court said that because it was insulated from direct control of the president, it violated the separation of powers.
It also said, however, that the problem could be corrected by allowing the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees the board and is more accountable to the president, to remove the board’s members at will.
The case is Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board.
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