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Supreme Court Might Hear Gun Control Case

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By LINDA GREENHOUSE, The New York Times

Published: November 12, 2007

WASHINGTON - Both sides in a closely watched legal battle over the District of Columbia's strict gun-control law are urging the Supreme Court to hear the case. If the justices agree - a step they may announce as early as Tuesday - the Roberts court is likely to find itself back on the front lines of the culture wars with an intensity unmatched even by the cases on abortion and race that defined the court's previous term.

The question is whether the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects an individual right to "keep and bear arms." If the answer is yes, as the federal appeals court held in March, the justices must then decide what such an interpretation means for a statute that bars all possession of handguns and that requires any other guns in the home to be disassembled or secured by trigger locks.

The Supreme Court has never answered the Second Amendment question directly, and it has been nearly 70 years since the court even approached it obliquely. A decision in 1939, United States v. Miller, held that a sawed-off shotgun was not one of the "arms" to which the Second Amendment referred.

Gun-control advocates have long maintained that the amendment's ambiguous opening reference to a "well-regulated militia" limited its scope to gun ownership in connection with service in a state militia. In the appeals court's view, the clause simply highlighted one of the amendment's "civic purposes."

Even though both sides are urging the court to hear the case, it is not a given the justices will accept the invitation. On the polarized court, that might depend on whether justices who feel strongly on either side can be confident of prevailing. It might also depend on the justices' collective appetite for injecting themselves into a controversy the court has avoided for so long.

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