Halo
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The media are already enlisting "experts" to try and downplay the significance of today's ruling....
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27guns.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/27/washington/27guns.html
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s historic decision on the right to bear arms on Thursday was a sweeping pronouncement of constitutional principles that will nonetheless have little practical impact in most of the country, legal experts said.
Most state and city gun restrictions appear to be allowed under the ruling, which appears to permit licensing laws, bans on possession by felons or the mentally ill, and prohibitions against carrying concealed weapons or guns in schools or government buildings. Justice Antonin Scalia said that list was not exhaustive.
“Dangerous” weapons can also be banned, although the term was not defined.
But Washington’s comprehensive ban on handguns used for self-defense in the home will have to be revised, and similar laws in several major cities are also vulnerable.
“It’s really the municipalities that are the offenders,” said Robert A. Levy, one of the lawyers on the winning side of the case.
“There is likely to be quite a flood of litigation to try to flesh out precisely what regulations are to be permitted and which ones are not,” Mr. Levy said. “The challenges are likely to be in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit.”
Adrian M. Fenty, the mayor of Washington, said that officials here are considering an amnesty period during which people who own handguns can register them without penalty.
Mr. Fenty emphasized that it remains illegal to carry handguns outside the home and that only registered guns may be may be kept at home. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons will generally remain illegal, Mr. Fenty said.
Chicago has a law very similar to the one struck down in Washington, and many of its suburbs, including Evanston, Morton Grove, Oak Park, Winnetka and Wilmette, also ban the possession of handguns in many settings. Toledo, Ohio, also bans some kinds of handguns, and San Francisco would have a similar ban had it not been pre-empted by state law.
As the list of affected localities demonstrates, gun control laws of the sort likely to be affected by Thursday’s decision are almost exclusively urban. Indeed, as Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote in a dissent, some 41 states pre-empt local gun regulations, indicating significant tensions between state lawmakers and municipal officials.
The status of laws that ban certain types of weapons is not clear, and that question is also likely to generate litigation. Six states, Puerto Rico and at least 14 municipalities ban assault weapons and semi-automatic weapons, Justice Breyer wrote.
Justice Scalia wrote that the Second Amendment’s protections apply only to weapons in common use, like rifles and pistols. “Dangerous and unusual” weapons, including ones used by the military, may be banned, Justice Scalia said.
Because the case before the court arose from the District of Columbia and thus involved only federal law, the court did not resolve the important question of whether the Second Amendment’s protections apply to limit state and local laws. Most legal experts said the court is likely to apply the amendment to the states in a later case.
