And that’s exactly what the Supreme Court suggested on Monday, when it declined to hear an appeal of a suit against a law in Highland Park, Illinois, that banned assault weapons and high-capacity magazines in the town.
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Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said the Supreme Court should have taken the case.
“The millions of Americans who use such “assault weapons” use them for the same lawful purposes as any other type of lawful firearm: hunting, recreational shooting and self-defense”, they argued in court papers.
In upholding Chicago’s ban, the dissenting justices said, the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals in its April decision to uphold the ban went against the high court’s 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which gave self-defense protections to individuals under the Second Amendment.
The Supreme Court has repeatedly turned away challenges to gun restrictions since two landmark decisions that spelled out the right to a handgun to defend one’s own home. Had the high court taken up the Highland Park case, the justices would have issued their ruling next year in the heat of the presidential campaign.
The decision in favor of assault-weapon bans is only binding in the Seventh Circuit’s juridictional area of Illinois, Wisconsin and in, said Jeffrey Jackson and William Rich, professors of constitutional law at Washburn Law School.
Liberals can take some small measure of solace in the fact that the NRA’s conception of gun rights without limit is shared by very few, and even many conservatives find it absurd. But he appears to have only one other vote for his NRA-sponsored theory-and until he gets more, the Second Amendment will continue to allow for bans on the kind of weapons that enable mass shootings. The case arose out of a law in Highland Park, Illinois, which outlawed assault weapons-including the semiautomatic firearms used in many mass shootings like Sandy Hook.
“Like any right, the Second Amendment is necessarily limited by the public’s right to live – a right not to be shot”.
What is clear following the Supreme Court decision is that unlike the victims of its loopholes, California’s assault weapon ban, is still alive.
The weapons ban “is highly suspect because it broadly prohibits common semi-automatic firearms used for lawful purposes” wrote Justice Thomas.
Some lawmakers have been hesitant to enact such bans in fear the law will be overturned by the courts.
The subject of restricting the availability of assault-style weapons came up in President Obama’s Oval Office speech Sunday evening. Federalism allows it, and sanity demands it, unless and until the Supreme Court someday says otherwise.
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“Highland Park’s ban includes some of the most popular firearms in the nation”, David H. Thompson, a lawyer for the challengers, wrote in briefs. But he also said that if the ban decreased “the perceived risk from a mass shooting, and makes the public feel safer as a result, that’s a substantial benefit”. “What we can do, and must do, is make it harder for them to kill”.
