The Supreme Court's Second Amendment Appetite by Linda Greenhouse
'The sound of gunshots is still ringing in the country’s ears. Do the justices hear it too?
With the sound of gunshots still ringing in the country’s ears, here’s the question of the moment for the Supreme Court: Do the justices hear it too?
Back in January, I devoted my first column of the new year to the growing impatience of some members of the court for a chance to move the boundaries of the Second Amendment from the home — where its 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller had located the amendment’s protection of the right to bear arms — out to the wider world. A few weeks later, the court agreed to hear the first Second Amendment case in nearly a decade.
The case seemed so quirky that at first I didn’t take this development very seriously. At issue is a New York City regulation that prohibited most licensed handgun owners from taking their guns out of the city, even to a second home or to a shooting range for target practice. No other jurisdiction has so restrictive a policy for those it deems worthy of owning a gun in the first place. A gun owners’ group, the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, challenged the regulation, which dates to 2001, and appealed to the Supreme Court after the federal courts in New York upheld it.
It would be easy for a court, if so inclined, to strike down this regulation while leaving all other gun restrictions intact. But as briefs from gun rights groups began arriving at the court, it became apparent something much more is at stake. Quirky as the regulation might be, this case is potentially the vehicle that Justices Samuel Alito, Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh have been waiting for — a chance to turn the ambiguous and quite narrow Heller decision into the constitutional charter for gun rights that the gun lobby had hoped for but has not yet obtained.
Heller was a 5-to-4 decision, and Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote the principal dissenting opinion, indicated in a memoir published shortly before his death last month that Justice Antonin Scalia, the majority opinion’s author, had to compromise to hold his majority. His opinion deemed the right to keep a handgun at home for self-defense as the “core” Second Amendment right and continued: “It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.” The court thus left undefined both what it was protecting beyond the “core” and how vigorously courts should scrutinize restrictions that extend out from the home or that deal with other kinds of firearms.
In his memoir, “The Making of a Justice,” Justice Stevens described his disappointment at failing to recruit Justice Anthony Kennedy to his side of the argument. His clear suggestion was that it was Justice Kennedy who extracted some of the limiting language as the price for signing the majority opinion. Now, of course, Justice Kennedy is gone. His successor, Justice Kavanaugh, based on the views he expressed while a federal appeals court judge, will have no such diffidence about endorsing a far-reaching Second Amendment.'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/opinion/guns-supreme-court.html?
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