Efforts to take guns off America’s streets suffered a setback yesterday when a Supreme Court ruling struck down a Chicago handgun ban that has been in place for nearly 30 years.
The ruling, which outlaws the ban on the basis that the right “to keep and bear arms” must be upheld by state and local as well as federal laws, opens the way for challenges to hard-won gun control measures across the country.
Tight regulations on gun ownership in New York and parts of California could now be subject to lawsuits by the National Rifle Association (NRA) even though theY are credited with reducing gun violence, warned those who seek tighter controls yesterday.
Chicago’s ban has been targeted by NRA lawyers since a similar ruling two years ago overturned stricter controls in the District of Columbia, on the ground that they conflicted with the Second Amendment.
The ruling is likely to raise pressure on the gun control lobby as the issue may be a key topic in the court’s nomination hearings for Elena Kagan, which started yesterday. John Cornyn, a Republican senator who will be among her toughest questioners, said that he saw her as “a reliable vote against Americans’ right to bear arms”.
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In a partisan vote, the Supreme Court’s five conservative justices voted against the Chicago ban, and against a passionate dissenting opinion from the liberal Justice John Paul Stevens.
On his last day after 34 years on the court, Justice Stevens invoked the example of other countries “that share our British heritage” to argue that the US has become “an international outlier in the permissiveness of its approach to guns”.
Clarence Thomas, the court’s only black justice and a reliable member of its conservative bloc, offered an explicitly racial argument in favour of the ruling. Owning and using guns was often black citizens’ only defence against “mob violence”, he wrote.
“As Eli Cooper, one target of such violence, is said to have explained, ‘The Negro has been run over for 50 years, but it must stop now, and pistols and shotguns are the only weapons to stop a mob’.”
Outside the court yesterday both sides in the battle over America’s gun laws claimed a partial victory. “This ruling does not give the NRA what they wanted, which is ‘any gun, anywhere, any time’,” Daniel Vice, of the Brady Center for the Prevention of Gun Violence, said. In fact, it makes clear that gun control measures short of outright bans — such as background checks and cooling-off periods before owners can take delivery of new guns — should be upheld by lower courts.
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Welcoming Mr Stevens’s dissenting opinion, Mr Vice said: “Clearly there is no inherent right to have a gun as a crucial part of freedom, because other free countries don’t have that right and, in fact, have much lower gun violence”.
In the US as in its highest court, such views remain in the minority.
Yesterday’s ruling was widely predicted given the court’s conservative majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts. It was also ironic. Justice Roberts has described himself as a committed advocate of “states’ rights” — the freedom of states to pass their own laws.
In this case those rights have been comprehensively subordinated to the most controversial clause in the US Constitution.