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The Kansas City
Star Wednesday, May 8, 2002, Page A-3 Agency propounds gun right Solicitor general backs individual right to bear arms
Star News Services WASHINGTON
– The Justice Department has declared that the Constitution gives
individuals the right to own a gun, a position that largely reverses six
decades of federal policy. In
briefs filed late Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice
Department rejected a long-held interpretation that the Second Amendment
guarantees gun rights only to militias, not to individuals. The
department’s stance elevates a long-simmering battle between the gun
lobby and gun control advocates to the high
court, with Attorney General John Ashcroft and the Justice
Department voicing their strongest support yet for the gun lobby. The
National Rifle Association applauded the Justice Department’s stance.
Gun law scholars and gun control advocates said they were
alarmed, because the shift in position threatens to undermine a range of
gun laws. Since
the 1930s, the federal government and the courts have declared almost
without exception that people have no constitutional right to own a gun
and that the government can pass laws restricting who can own a gun and
what types of weapons they can own. In
two pending appeals, however, the Bush administration asserted for the
first time before the Supreme Court that it thinks that legal reasoning
is flawed. “The
current position of the United States ….. is that the Second Amendment
more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who
are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or
training, to possess and bear their own firearms,”
Solicitor General Theodore Olson wrote in a footnote to the
briefs. That
right, Olson acknowledged, is subject to certain restrictions that allow
the government to keep weapons out of the hands of
“unfit persons” and to ban certain types
of weapons often used by criminals. The
briefs do not ask the court to take any action. In both cases, defendants charged with gun offenses raised
Second Amendment defenses and appealed to the Supreme Court. One
is Emerson v. United States, No. 01-8780, an appeal by a doctor who was
charged with violating a federal law that makes it a crime for someone
to own a gun while under a domestic violence restraining order. The
other is Haney v. United States, No. 01-8272, an appeal by a man
convicted of owning two machine guns in violation of federal law. Olson
urged the Supreme Court to turn down both appeals. He said that even accepting an individual right to bear arms,
the application of the laws in both cases reflect
the kind of restrictions by which that right can reasonably be limited.
Consequently, there was no reason for the court to take either
case, the briefs said.
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