Townhall.com
Jacob Sullum

Ten years ago this week, the Supreme Court for the first time explicitly recognized that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to armed self-defense. Since then the Court has revisited the subject only twice, while it has heard about 45 cases involving the Fourth Amendment and about 60 involving the First.

That stark disparity reflects a failure noted by critics on and off the Court. After waiting more than two centuries to acknowledge that the Second Amendment imposes limits on legislation, the Court has passed up dozens of opportunities to clarify the extent of those limits, leaving the task to lower courts that are often hostile to gun rights.

District of Columbia v. Heller, decided on June 26, 2008, overturned a handgun ban in the nation's capital, finding it inconsistent with the Second Amendment right to use firearms for self-defense. Two years later, the Court overturned a similar law in Chicago, confirming that the Second Amendment constrains states and cities as well as the federal government.

Aside from those two landmark decisions, the Court has enforced the Second Amendment in just one case. In 2016 it ruled that the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts had flouted Heller when it upheld that state's ban on stun guns based on the mistaken premise that the Second Amendment applies only to militarily useful weapons that were in common use when it was enacted.

That is far from the only time a court has reached a conclusion that seems inconsistent with what the Court has said about the Second Amendment. "Most federal judges have not accepted Heller," Alan Gura, the lawyer who argued the case, recently told Tom Gresham on the radio show 'Gun Talk'. "They have taken the posture of 'go ahead and make me do it.'"

Over and over again, the justices have declined to do so. Last year, for instance, the Court refused to hear a case challenging California's highly restrictive carry permit policy, which lets local law enforcement officials decide who may be armed in public. As Justice Clarence Thomas pointed out in a dissent, it is "extremely improbable" that the right to keep and bear arms is limited to the home.

Bans on so-called assault weapons also seem to be at odds with Heller, which said the Second Amendment covers weapons "in common use" for "lawful purposes" -- a description that plainly applies to the guns targeted by such laws, since Americans own more than 16 million of them and almost never use them to commit crimes. Yet the Court has turned away challenges to "assault weapon" bans in Maryland and Highland Park, llinois.

Federal appeals courts have disagreed with each other on both of these issues, creating circuit splits that ordinarily would invite the Supreme Court's intervention. The lower courts also have disagreed about the level of scrutiny that should be applied to laws that impinge on Second Amendment rights, another question that Heller left unresolved.

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As Justice Thomas stated in dissent earlier this year when the court declined to grant cert on another California case:

"And it is symptomatic of the lower courts’ general failure to afford the Second Amendment the respect due an enumerated constitutional right. If a lower court treated another right so cavalierly, I have little doubt that this Court would intervene. But as evidenced by our continued inaction in this area, the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this Court."

not in my court

quote:

Originally posted by Palm:
As Justice Thomas stated in dissent earlier this year when the court declined to grant cert on another California case:

"And it is symptomatic of the lower courts’ general failure to afford the Second Amendment the respect due an enumerated constitutional right. If a lower court treated another right so cavalierly, I have little doubt that this Court would intervene. But as evidenced by our continued inaction in this area, the Second Amendment is a disfavored right in this Court."

No disrespect at all to Justice Thomas but that quote just makes me go



He's calling it like it is.