WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Supreme Court's historic decision Monday allowing gun owners to challenge city and state regulations as a violation of their Second Amendment rights clears the way for new challenges to firearms laws nationwide.
A five-justice conservative majority, over vigorous protests from the four more liberal justices, declared the right to keep and bear arms is fundamental to the American notion of liberty and can shield gun owners from certain regulations across the country. Although the majority noted some gun laws would stand, such as prohibitions on felons possessing firearms, its rationale is certain to usher in a new era of litigation over gun control.
The case stemmed from a 28-year-old Chicago law that was a rare, total ban on handguns. The law was challenged by four homeowners who said they needed handguns for their safety. The high court's decision could fuel lawsuits against myriad local regulations - from firearms licensing requirements to limits on weapons carried outside the home.
"It's going to be city by city, town by town, block by block," National Rifle Association Vice President Wayne LaPierre vowed Monday. "We're going to have to work into every level to make sure this constitutional victory isn't turned into a practical defeat."
Monday's decision was somewhat predictable, based the justices' 5-4 decision in 2008 that first found an individual right to bear arms in the Second Amendment, and on the tenor of oral arguments in the Chicago case in March.
Yet it greatly expands the force and consequences of the ruling two years ago and generated new concern from city officials worried it would undercut gun laws and lead to more violence.
"Across the country, cities are struggling with how to address this issue," Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said at City Hall. "Common sense tells you we need fewer guns on the street, not more guns."
David Pope, president of the village of Oak Park, outside Chicago, which also was defending a handgun ban, said the ruling curbs local flexibility to address crime. "For a long time, we always thought it was reasonable and constitutional for different cities and towns to have different regulations," he said.
Several large cities, including Baltimore, Cleveland and Oakland, had urged the court not to rule against Chicago. They were joined by three states with urban centers, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey, that warned if the high court extended the Second Amendment's reach, "nearly every firearms law will become the subject of a constitutional challenge, and even in cases where the law ultimately survives, its defense will be costly and time-consuming."
Kristen Rand, legislative director of the Violence Policy Center, which supports strict gun-control laws, predicted more than a new tide of lawsuits.
"People will die because of this decision," she said. "It is a victory only for the gun lobby and America's fading firearms industry."
As Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito announced the court's opinion from the bench Monday, though, he said experts differ on whether private gun possession increases or decreases death and injury.
Alito also said that the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, establishing the right to keep and bear arms under federal law, steered the court's decision Monday. The 2008 case arose from a handgun ban in Washington, D.C.
In Monday's case, Alito deemed the right to bear arms "fundamental" and noted the court had previously held that most provisions of the Bill of Rights apply to both the federal government and the states. He was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy and Clarence Thomas.
Justices John Paul Stevens, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.
Breyer read portions of his dissent from the bench Monday, warning the new ruling would interfere with legislative efforts nationwide to control firearms and violence.
Dissenting separately, Justice Stevens, who is retiring, criticized the majority's view that the Second Amendment right to firearms is so fundamental and valuable that it must be applied broadly.
"Just as (firearms) can help homeowners defend their families and property from intruders," Stevens wrote, "they can help thugs and insurrectionists murder innocent victims. The threat that firearms will be misused is far from hypothetical, for gun crime has devastated many of our communities."
'Not the end of all gun laws'
Monday's case, brought by Otis McDonald and three other Chicagoans who said they wanted to keep handguns in their home for self-defense, presented the second round of high-stakes litigation over the scope of the Second Amendment.
For decades, despite polls showing Americans believed in an individual right to bear arms, most federal judges had ruled that the Second Amendment covered only a right of state militias, such as National Guards. That changed when the justices ruled definitively in 2008 there is an individual right to firearms in the home for personal safety.
In trying to distinguish its handgun ban from the Washington, D.C., ordinance struck down in 2008, the City of Chicago had argued that firearms violence there was of such a magnitude that the court should not extend its earlier decision to the states.
Chicago officials argued the Second Amendment involves a right to possess an item designed to kill or cause injury and cannot be likened to, for example, the First Amendment right of free speech, because it is not fundamental to individual liberty.
Alito's opinion for the court rejected that idea. He said that "a provision of the Bill of Rights that protects a right that is fundamental from an American perspective applies equally to the federal government and the states." He also dismissed arguments from Chicago officials and their backers that the court's extending the Second Amendment to the states would threaten all existing gun laws.
He said the Heller decision "recognized that the right to keep and bear arms is not 'a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.' We repeat those assurances here. Despite municipal respondents' doomsday proclamations, (the decision) does not imperil law regulating firearms."
Justice Breyer, in his dissenting opinion signed by Ginsburg and Sotomayor, insisted state and local communities have carefully considered how they want to regulate guns and that their judgments would now be usurped by judges.
The Chicago challengers' case was brought on June 26, 2008, the day the Supreme Court struck down the Washington, D.C., handgun ban. Chicagoans Adam Orlov and Colleen and David Lawson joined McDonald in the case.
They were represented by Virginia lawyer Alan Gura, who had taken the lead on Heller.
"The court has made clear that the Second Amendment is a powerful, meaningful right," Gura said Monday.
"This is not the end of all gun laws. We weren't seeking an end to all gun laws. But it is going to be the end of those laws meant only to interfere with people's constitutional rights."
He said some registration laws, for example, can be so cumbersome that they restrict gun rights. Gura said he would soon be filing more lawsuits.
Some cities already revising laws
Chicago's Mayor Daley suggested the court's decision reflected a lack of understanding of the tragedies wrought by gun violence. "To suggest that Chicago's elected officials haven't done enough to protect our city's residents shows many of our highest level officials don't understand that gun violence pervades America, not just Chicago," he said.
He said the city was considering how to revise its law. The justices' rationale is likely to lead to the invalidation of the Chicago handgun ban, but the high court's majority did not definitely rule against the city's ban, and instead sent Monday's case back to lower courts for final action.
Some cities had begun revising their gun-control laws in anticipation of Monday's ruling. In Wilmette, Ill., Village Manager Timothy Frenzer said the community repealed its 19-year-old gun ban shortly after the high court's 2008 decision, largely because the "outcome (Monday) was predictable."
"All the groundwork had been laid in 2008 for the court to take the step it did today," Frenzer says.
In the two years since the community's gun ban was repealed, Frenzer says there has been "no detectable change" in crime.
Some cities, including New York, have strict gun licensing rules that critics such as LaPierre say end up being a ban for some would-be gun owners.
"I will continue to collaborate with mayors across the country to pursue common-sense, constitutional approaches to protecting public safety," said Bloomberg, co-chairman of the national coalition Mayors Against Illegal Guns.
The majority of states sided with those challenging Chicago's ban. Thirty-eight states, led by Texas, said the Second Amendment should apply broadly. They said that some 44 states have a right to keep and bear arms in their own state constitutions.
On Capitol Hill, lawmakers' reactions reflected the public's deep divisions over gun laws.
Judiciary Committee members Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, and Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., praised the ruling. Hatch called it a "victory for law-abiding gun owners." Leahy said "state and local governments will now have to proceed more carefully" on gun regulations, but "it will be in respect of a right that belongs to all Americans."
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee, countered that she was "extremely dismayed" by the court's ruling.
"I believe the proliferation of guns has made this country less safe, not more safe," said Feinstein, a former San Francisco mayor. She assumed that job in 1978, after then-mayor George Moscone was fatally shot by former supervisor Dan White.
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