New Ground Broken!

It’s been a while, and I figured ‘what better event to kick-start a blog entry than a ground-breaking Supreme Court decision'?

As you may or may not know, what with all the other news vying for attention, is that yesterday the Court ruled that the Second Amendment is applicable to states and localities. This decision was a logical follow-on to the Heller decision two years ago in which the Court (finally) ruled that the Second Amendment is an individual right.

What the affect of this ruling will be is that states and localities are going to have to defend their gun laws in court. All that’s been decided thus far is that total bans on handguns are unconstitutional, but over the next few decades, the Supreme Court and the Circuit Courts of Appeal will develop precedent on which gun laws are constitutional and which are not. The Supreme Court has already signaled in the decision yesterday that the more reasonable laws will be upheld, such as prohibitions on criminals having guns and restrictions on where guns can be lawfully carried (IE, not in courthouses, schools, etc.).

All kinds of laws are going to be challenged, but my prediction is that the biggest, fattest targets out there are laws by states such as Maryland , Massachusetts , Wisconsin , Hawaii , and Illinois that either totally deny or severely curtail the rights of citizens to carry. Most states currently provide carry licenses to citizens without criminal records who have passed basic gun safety classes, but the above states either allow government officials to arbitrarily deny the permits or have no allowance in law for carry whatsoever.

Take Maryland , my erstwhile home state, for example. Maryland bans both open AND concealed carry without a permit (states might be able to skirt the ruling if they allow open carry but forbid concealed, under the premise that they are regulating the method of carrying but not forbidding it altogether). Maryland does issue permits, but usually only to people who habitually transport valuables, have documented threats against their lives (and then only rarely), require it as part of their employment, or (most often) know someone in the state government. If you don’t know someone and just want to carry the weapon in case, God forbid, you need to defend your life, Maryland says ‘too bad’ (though they’ll happily accept your application fee).

With the Second Amendment now applicable against states and enshrined as a fundamental right of citizenship, that sort of law is going to be extremely difficult to defend from constitutional challenges. It’s true that the Supreme Court has only thus far addressed the ‘keeping’ of arms, rather than the ‘bearing’, but it’s going to be impossible to separate the one from the other. (Indeed, the Court addressed and dismissed attempts to do so in Heller, and implicitly endorses in McDonald a right to carry in ‘non-sensitive’ places by the way it singled out restrictions on ‘sensitive’ places as examples of legitimate restrictions.) Of course, that won’t stop state attorneys general from tying themselves in knots attempting to do so, which will be amusing to see.

If one were desirous of getting one’s name on a legal precedent, now might be a good time to apply for a Maryland permit, get denied (you have to get denied first because you need to show ‘injury’), and challenge the law in court. Hey, I’m just saying... O:)

Right! A lot of other stuff happened over the last five months! I’ll be back later this week to fill you in on all of that (PROMISE!).

UPDATE: Apparently, others agree with my above predictions.