District of Columbia v. Heller

And Justice Thomas argued the court should revisit it and hold explicitly that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms, which the plain text of the language does.

That ultimately became the Heller case, Heller versus District of Columbia.

And that case I know very, very well because I represented 31 states in the Heller case before the court, arguing for the court to do exactly what it did, which is protect the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Bruin, as you noted, put additional teeth into the substantive test.

And actually City of Chicago versus McDonald, Clarence Thomas wrote an incredibly important opinion.

So Heller was in the District of Columbia.

The District of Columbia is a federal enclave.

And so Heller was decided saying, okay, this applies to DC, but it was an open question, does it apply to all 50 states? And in order to apply to all 50 states, look, as it was written, the Bill of Rights only applied to the federal government.

OK, well, it's an election year.

Can't talk guns and not get into politics, at least not since Heller.

you've said thomas massey is your ideal pro-gun candidate um an engineer who understands automation and economics and point to yes yeah point to senator bill hagerty's focus on manufacturing and re-industrializing the country massey won't be back next year um the kentucky congressman lost his primary do you worry now more than ever dc will make gun ownership harder

So this is an interesting one.

Like you said, Al Capone had a monopoly on them.

So supply and demand, prices would go up.

But it wasn't until 1950s, U.S. versus Billard got fixed, and it was 2008 with Columbia versus Heller.

Have you seen things better or worse in the 20 years since Heller for gun rights?

A Supreme Court reversal on the individual right interpretation.

The Heller decision in two thousand eight established that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, not just a collective right tied to militia service.

Overturning that would require a constitutional amendment or a complete change in the court's jurisprudence.

Neither of which is happening.

This is the same court that gave us the strongest circuit court opinion we've ever seen relative to the Second Amendment just weeks ago.

The panel was leaning very heavily on language from D.C. v. Heller.

Scalia wrote that the Second Amendment does not protect weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, and this is where the M16 analysis comes into play, because he observed that M16 rifles and similar weapons may be banned.

Whatever pro-gun lawyers think about that sentence, folks, lower courts are going to treat it as powerful guidance until SCOTUS says otherwise, and that's what, uh, this lower court is doing right now.

Now, SCOTUS has combined this case, Viramontes, the Illinois assault weapons ban case, with another case similar, assault weapons ban out of Connecticut, Grant v. Higgins, and the legal question that'll be settled, hopefully, by the Supreme Court here, should settle the question of assault weapons bans for the entire country.

Now, specifically, the legal question presented before the Supreme Court is whether the Second Amendment and, by extension, the 14th Amendment that applies incorporates the second against the states as well as the federal government authority, whether the Second and 14th Amendment protect an individual's right to possess AR-15 platform and similar semi-automatic rifles, and it'll test how the decisive Second Amendment jurisprudence cases of Heller and McDonald, and Catano, and Bruin, and Walford, all apply to the most commonly owned semi-automatic rifles that Americans possess, but which some governments have disparagingly labeled assault weapons bans, as if they were something unusually evil.

Now, there will be oral argument on this case.

It's scheduled for December 2nd of this year.

The right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment is among the most fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty.

That's from the seminal Supreme Court Second Amendment jurisprudence case of McDonald.

Remember, Heller said that you have an individual right to keep and bear arms.

That was 2008, I believe.

So it's impossible to argue that AR-15s are uncommon.

In District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008, my friends... 2008, 18 years ago, this court held that the District of Columbia's ban on the possession of handguns violated the Second Amendment under the two-step text, then history, and now.

So first, plain text.

Does the law touch on the people and their ability to keep and bear arms? And then history.

What is unique about Glock? And I certainly don't think they can describe anything that makes it more dangerous, especially since these, again, are in common use.

go back to i think it was a bruin decision at the supreme court you know guns that are in common use are presumptively protected by the second amendment so again new york state once again tries to defy the second amendment and uh well they've been sued what i found interesting is uh they've been really sued So far, the National Rifle Association, the Second Amendment Foundation, and the Firearms Policy Coalition announced that they are suing because the measure, the New York State law, was barred by the Supreme Court's Heller decision.

so i wasn't brewing it was heller um the uh which is basically guns in common use are presumably protected by the second amendment again i find it very interesting that these three national firearms pro advocacy groups are not claiming that it violates the second amendment they're claiming that it violates a supreme court opinion which is not law and certainly not the supreme law of the land And again, the Supreme Court said it invalidated Washington, D.C.'s handgun law.

That's the Heller case.

Saying that, you know, hey, your right to keep and bear arms includes your right to carry a handgun.

And the type of handgun is really up to the carrier, not the government to decide what is and isn't dangerous or isn't safe.

So Joelle, can you fill us in on the background to this case? Sort of the big picture.

What was the Second Amendment law and local law about guns like before Heller? And what's happened since then? Great.

Yeah.

So that was very helpful background.

The Second Amendment is an unusual constitutional right in our history in that it is so recent that the Supreme Court has gotten into the business of really interpreting it.

And that story really starts in 2008 with this case called District of Columbia v. Heller, which for the first time interpreted the Second Amendment to protect an individual right to keep and bear arms, as to say that the right is yours personally, not a right that you only have insofar as you are serving in a militia.

And we'll talk later on, I think, about the militia clause of the Second Amendment, that prefatory clause, and how that has figured into interpretations of the Second Amendment.

But before 2008, the Supreme Court had and other courts had generally thought of the Second Amendment as more oriented towards a militia and had thought of the Second Amendment as not applying against the states, not restricting states.