The Supreme Court Strikes Down Handgun Bans

Congratulations, handgun fans. States, cities and other localities are now constitutionally barred from protecting their citizens with common-sense gun regulations, including banning handguns in crowded metro areas wracked by gun violence.

Today, in McDonald v. Chicago, the most conservative elements of the Roberts Court banded together to "incorporate" the Second Amendment, meaning that the right to bear arms now trumps the ability of local government to protect local residents from such weapons.

As interpreted in the 2008 D.C. v. Heller opinion, the Second Amendment provides individuals the right to keep and bear arms. It was the first time in American history that the Second Amendment had been applied as an individual right, and a shocking ruling for the few that expected intellectual honesty and consistency from the originalism- and textualism-obsessed wing of the court.

The Supreme Court's decision in McDonald is no surprise for Court-watchers. The ruling marks the latest triumph for conservative judicial philosophy struck by the five most reactionary justices. And though today marks just the official announcement of a widely predicted result, there's no doubting that McDonald is a landmark decision.

In order to incorporate the Second Amendment under prior case law, the Court determined that the right to possess a handgun is "fundamental to the Nation's scheme of ordered liberty."

This bald assertion — relying on the "substantive due process" legal theory oft-panned by conservatives — was too much hypocrisy for the four moderate justices to bear. In a dramatic flair that we're increasingly seeing from the polarized Roberts Court, Justice Stephen Breyer recited a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. He was joined in his written dissent by Justice John Paul Stevens.

The thrust of both dissenting decisions is that the conservatives' application of the Due Process Clause to incorporate the right to bear arms rests on faulty premises.

Justice Scalia, who authored the 5-4 majority opinion in Heller, wrote separately in McDonald to take issue with Stevens' dissent. Specifically, Scalia targets Stevens' call for judicial "sensitivity to the interaction between the intrinsic aspects of liberty and the practical realities of contemporary society." In other words, Stevens has trouble ignoring the scourge of gun violence, and the importance of combating such violence through government legislation. What's wrong with that?

But in a particularly revealing passage, Justice Scalia caustically writes, "I cannot say whether that sensitivity will really guide judges because I have no idea what it is." I suppose restraint can be hard to understand when you have a strong penchant for judicial activism — that is, legislating from the bench.

Meanwhile, the victims of gun violence keep falling. And the Supreme Court just deprived local lawmakers of their most straightforward ability to protect them.

Photo Credit: U.S. Supreme Court/Franz Jantzen