(2003-05-07) Ninth Circuit Second Amendmen

With six judges dissenting, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court Of Appeals on Tuesday let stand a controversial ruling that found the Second Amendment doesn't give individuals a right to bear arms. Among the six who argued that the case (Silveira v. Lockyer, 312 F.3d 1052) should be reheard by an 11-judge en banc panel was the staunchly liberal Judge Harry Pregerson. But the yeoman's work in dissent was done by Judge Andrew Kleinfeld, who defended an individual's right to bear arms using the same means Judge Stephen Reinhardt employed in December to shoot it down: by weaving together scholarship, grammar and historical analysis... The rhetorical star of the dissenters was Judge Alex Kozinski, who chided Reinhardt's panel for endorsing individual rights in a selective manner. Kozinski, who as a child fled Romania when it was under the grip of dictator Nikolai Ceausescu, wrote that American slaves and Holocaust victims could have fought back had they been allowed to own guns. "The Second Amendment is a doomsday provision, one designed for those exceptionally rare circumstances where all other rights have failed - where the government refuses to stand for re-election and silences those who protest; where courts have lost the courage to oppose, or can find no one to enforce their decrees," Kozinski wrote.

Update: District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), was a landmark decision of the US Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to keep and bear arms, unconnected with service in a militia, for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home, and that the District of Columbia's handgun ban and requirement that lawfully owned rifles and shotguns be kept "unloaded and disassembled or bound by a trigger lock" violated this guarantee.[1] It also stated that the right to bear arms is not unlimited and that guns and gun ownership would continue to be regulated. It was the first Supreme Court case to decide whether the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense or if the right was intended for state militias.[2]