Top court to rule on gun control ordinance

Many lobbies besieging Congress are powerful like Big Pharma and the insurance companies. Indeed, the reason America is never likely to have singlepayer, universal health insurance is the drug and insurance firms.
But the Jewish Lobby may be the most potent of all. It is an unspoken rule of American politics that members of Congress never criticize Israeli policies--at least if they hope to be re-elected.
Still another K Street powerhouse not to be crossed is the National Rifle Association. Few members of Congress dare oppose its positions no matter how outrageous they are. But the Supreme Court, whose members have a life term, is beholden to no one. It can vote its politics with impunity.
The court will decide, probably in June, whether the Constitution allows individuals to keep guns in their homes. It also could render a key interpretation of the Second Amendment which declares the “right of the people to keep and bear arms.”
The case stems from a Washington, D.C., ordinance banning handguns. The ordinance also requires that guns legally kept in the home, rifles and shotguns, are to be disassembled and/or kept under a trigger lock.
A U.S. appeals court in Washington, contrary to decades of court opinions, declared in March that the ordinance was unconstitutional. It said that the Second Amendment right was an individual one, not linked to service in a militia.
The Supreme Court concluded in 1939 that private ownership of guns must have “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of the efficiency of a well-regulated militia.”
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in 1996 that the Second Amendment “does not protect the possession of a weapon by a private citizen.” The 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declared in 1971 that “there can be no serious claim to any express constitutional right of an individual to possess a firearm.”
And Chief Justice Warren Burger, by no stretch of the imagination a liberal, called the NRA reading of the Second Amendment, a great fraud, the issue distorted and “confused by calculated disinformation.”
The D.C. ordinance, enacted in 1976, is carefully drawn. It is mindful of the needs of citizens to protect themselves from an intruder. The district council members who enacted the ordinance knew that guns allowed at home can be assembled and the trigger unlocked, all in less than a minute.
Colonial days are “ancient” history. So are muskets. Governments today may enact gun curbs such as the D.C. ordinance.
Guns foster the violence rampant in America. The nation records 30,000 gun deaths yearly. Surely government has the right to try to halt some of the slayings. The recent slaughters in Nebraska and Colorado are another in a long line of sickening and senseless killings.
Yet the NRA has constantly stood in the way of sanity. And the Congress has constantly pandered to is agenda. Congress did enact a 10-year ban in 1994 on assault weapons. But when it came up for renewal, President Bush and Congress, caving in to the NRA, allowed the law to lapse.
Roy Romer, former governor of Colorado, summed up the NRA position perfectly when he said: “If the NRA is so out of touch with Colorado that it cannot even support the single proposition that a 14-year-old has no business carrying a loaded gun to school, then the NRA is part of the problem not part of the solution.”
The NRA is part of the problem. When Congress passed a law in 1986 outlawing ownership of machine guns by private citizens, the NRA fought the measure until slapped down by the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. (The Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal in the case.)
The NRA, representing the forces of barbarity battling against civilization, has also fought curbs on assault weapons like AK-47s and Uzis. And, yes, the use of armor-piercing bullet. And, yes, it even opposed the Brady Act requiring a five-day waiting period before buying a gun to check on felons and the mentally unstable.
Bob Herbert, New York Times columnist, rightly characterizes the NRA as an “inflammatory, obsessive outfit deaf to public opinion.” It has “contributed mightily to the long decades of carnage in our streets and homes.”
Nevertheless, the Supreme Court, based on its reactionary rulings in the 2006-2007 term, is likely to strike down the D.C. ordinance. If form holds, the American people will be the losers and the NRA the winners yet again.
Email: jake@unr.edu