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The following is a list of legal experts and/or authorities on Second Amendment issues who have come out with comments about the U.S. Supreme Court taking up the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller – the so-called D.C. Gun Ban Case. This information is from Reuters. For more information and to get contact information, visit Reuters.
1. FRANCIS GRAHAM LEE, Ph.D., professor and chair of the political science department at SAINT JOSEPH’S UNIVERSITY in Philadelphia, has written and published extensively about the Supreme Court: “More and more recent research on the Second Amendment, and not NRA research, is reaching the conclusion that the ‘intent of the Framers’ was to protect individual rights to bear arms and not simply to ensure that the feds did not abolish the state militia. That said, two points have to be noted: Even assuming it is an individual right,the court has never found our constitutional rights to be absolutes — there are cases of speech that can be prohibited. Secondly, there is the matter of whether the Second Amendment applies to the states — the issue of incorporation. The court has, over time, incorporated almost all the guarantees of the Bill of Rights onto the states via the Fourteenth Amendment,but the Second has never been incorporated. Should it now be ‘selectively ‘incorporated?”
2. ANDERS WALKER, Ph.D., assistant professor of law at the SAINT LOUIS UNIVERSITY School of Law, is extremely knowledgeable on the history of the Second Amendment and constitutional law. Walker predicts the Supreme Court will rule in favor of the individual citizen in the Washington, D.C., handgun ban case: “The Supreme Court is likely to uphold an individual right to bear arms. Though many scholars claim that the Second Amendment applies only to a collective right, notions of ‘collective’ vs. ‘personal’ rights are themselves misleading. A close survey of the historical record suggests that the Supreme Court has always envisioned Americans keeping arms in their homes and using arms personally, whether for militia purposes or not.”
3. BILL MATEJA, principal in the Dallas office of FISH & RICHARDSON: “This sets the stage for a gunfight, the likes of which we haven’t seen since the O.K. Corral, and someone, be it the NRA or the Brady Center, isn’t coming back alive.” Mateja, former federal prosecutor who argued on behalf of the government in the seminal gun rights case of U.S. v. Emerson and previously oversaw the Justice Department’s violent crime efforts (including the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms) as senior counsel to two deputy attorney sgeneral, was not surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court granted the District of Columbia’s petition for writ of certiorari in seeking to overturn a lower court ruling that struck down the city’s 30-year-old ban on private handgun ownership.
4. STEPHEN P. HALBROOK is a research fellow at the INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE,author of the forthcoming book “The Founders’ Second Amendment,” and a winning Second Amendment attorney: “The Washington, D.C., handgun ban infringes on the right of the people to keep and bear arms,’ which is every bit as much apart of the Bill of Rights as is the right to free speech and the right against unreasonable search and seizure. District residents are not second-class citizens — they are entitled to all freedoms of the Bill of Rights. The Framers intended that an armed citizenry would encourage a well-regulated militia, which they saw as essential for a free state.”
5. PAUL F. DAVIS, author of “United States of Arrogance” (nominated for a Pulitzer Prize): “The Second Amendment was intended to give individuals the right to keep guns for private uses — including self-defense — not to give states the right to maintain militias. States already aggressively compete in commerce, taxation, legal restrictions and issuing of licenses. The last sort of competition and adversarial rivalry we need among states is in regard to security by way of militias.”
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For all the stories and information on D.C. vs. Heller, click this link.
Posted by Tom Remington
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