Gun Rule May Not Have Wide Impact

WASHINGTON - The individual right to bear arms identified by the Supreme Court on Thursday will have little practical impact in most of the country, legal experts said, though Washington's comprehensive ban on handguns used for self-defense in the home will have to be revised, and similar laws in several cities are also vulnerable.

Most state and city gun restrictions appear to be allowed under the ruling, including licensing laws, limits on the commercial sale of guns, restrictions on guns in places like schools and government buildings, and prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill. "Dangerous and unusual" weapons can also be banned, although that phrase was not fully defined.

Justice Antonin Scalia, writing for the majority in the 5-4 decision, also suggested that bans on concealed weapons would probably survive Second Amendment muster. The legal battlegrounds will be cities with laws similar to Washington's essentially complete ban, notably Chicago.

"It's really the municipalities that are the offenders," said Robert A. Levy, one of the lawyers on the winning side of the case and an architect of the victorious strategy. "There is likely to be quite a flood of litigation to try to flesh out precisely what regulations are to be permitted and which ones are not. The challenges are likely to be in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia and Detroit."

In fact, a lawsuit against Chicago's very restrictive law was filed almost immediately after the Supreme Court's decision. Four Chicago residents and two gun rights groups asked the U.S. District Court there to strike down the local law.

Adrian M. Fenty, the mayor of Washington, said the city was taking steps to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling. Washington, D.C., officials are considering an amnesty period during which people who own handguns can register them without penalty, Fenty said.

In addition to Chicago, as Justice Stephen Breyer wrote in a dissenting opinion, several of its suburbs ban the possession of handguns in many settings. San Francisco would have a similar ban had it not been pre-empted by state law.

As the list of affected localities demonstrates, gun control laws of the sort likely to be affected by Thursday's decision are almost exclusively urban. Indeed, some 40 states pre-empt local gun regulations.

Florida already has a free-standing, personal constitutional right to keep and bear arms in self-defense explicitly set forth in its state constitution, a spokesman for the state attorney general's office said.