BELLEVUE, WA – The Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms today hailed a ruling by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia that, for the first time in American history, struck down a gun law on Second Amendment grounds.
The case was Parker v. District of Columbia, challenging the 31-year-old District of Columbia ban on handgun registrations to allow citizens to keep functional handguns in their District residences for personal protection.
“Anti-gunners are screaming hysterically about ‘judicial activism at its worst’ that ignored decades of ‘Supreme Court precedent’,†noted CCRKBA Executive Director Joe Waldron. “In fact, this ruling strikes a mortal blow to decades of judicial activism based on erroneous interpretation and deliberate misrepresentation of a 1939 Supreme Court decision, and returns the Second Amendment to its historically accurate place in the Bill of Rights.
“It is both sad and amusing at the same time that the dominant press has largely refrained from mentioning that the ruling says the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms that is not limited to militia service,†Waldron noted.
In writing the majority opinion, Senior Judge Laurence H. Silberman states, “The Amendment does not protect ‘the right of militiamen to keep and bear arms,’ but rather ‘the right of the people’.â€
“Judge Silberman properly concludes what gun rights scholars have been saying for years,†Waldron observed. “The Second Amendment is not some mythical ‘collective right,’ but an individual civil right equal to rights guaranteed to individual citizens under the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments.
“Today’s ruling corrects long-standing misrepresentations of the 1939 ruling in U.S. v Miller, and more than three decades of injustice suffered by District of Columbia residents,†Waldron said. “Judge Silberman did his research and reached the only logical conclusion one could have about the meaning of the Second Amendment.â€
The ruling may be viewed at http://www.saf.org/dc.lawsuit/parker.decision.pdf 194 KiB
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