Firearms Industry Looking Forward to Supreme Court Vindication of Gun Ownership Rights

On Tuesday, the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), which is the trade association of the firearms industry, praised the decision by the United States Supreme Court to determine with final authority whether the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution provides an individual right to keep and bear arms.

The case being heard is now called the District of Columbia v. Heller.

The mayor of Washington, D.C., Adrian M. Fenty, filed the appeal to the Supreme Court after the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia struck down the District's handgun ban in March.

According to FBI statistics, Washington, D.C., ranks as one of the most dangerous cities in the United States and maintains one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the country. This is with the gun ban in place.

The District Court's opinion stated that the language used in the Second Amendment led the Court to believe that the right to keep and bear arms is an individual right, not a state "right".

Backers of the D.C. gun ban and advocates of gun control laws claim that the Second Amendment was only meant to allow for the maintaining of local and state militias, and some maintain that in our day and age it might as well be repealed.

"The government has powers, not rights. The contention that the Second Amendment is a collective right of the government is completely without merit," says Lawrence G. Keane, NSSF senior vice president and general counsel.

Many highly respected Constitutional scholars including Lawrence Tribe of Harvard, Akhil Reed Amar of Yale, William Van Alstyne of Duke, and Sanford Levinson of the University of Texas support Keane's interpretation of the Second Amendment. They and their ilk assert that the Founders used the word "militia" to refer to the entire able-bodied adult population of the United States, and did not intend for it to be taken for what we today call a National Guard.

Others have pointed to texts written or transcribed during the Colonial era that they say clearly point to a group of Founders who were strong advocates of the individual right to keep and bear arms.

Author of the Bill of Rights James Madison, in his Federalist Papers, wrote, "The advantage of being armed...the Americans possess over the people of all other nations."

Patrick Henry, famous for his "Give me liberty or give me death" oration, was transcribed as saying to the Virginia Convention, "The great object is that every man be armed...Everyone who is able may have a gun."

Virginian Senator to the first Congress Richard Henry Lee, who was the initiator of the Declaration of Independence, wrote, "To preserve liberty, it is essential that the whole body of the people always possess arms, and be taught alike, especially when young, how to use them."
And President Thomas Jefferson once proudly proclaimed to a delegation of 11 different Native American tribes, "We are all, every one of us, gun-men."

"The firearms industry looks forward to the Supreme Court putting to rest the specious argument that the Second Amendment is not an individual right. This intellectually bankrupt and feeble argument has been used by gun control advocates to...deny Americans their civil rights to own and lawfully use firearms," added Keane.

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