On Tuesday, the Chicago-based 7th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down Illinois’s ban on carrying ready-to-use firearms. Moore v. Madigan is written by Judge Richard Posner, possibly the most famous non-Supreme Court judge in the country, and is an important extension of the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Judge Posner’s decision makes it very clear that the right to self-defense entails more than just allowing people to keep guns in the home.
In the landmark case of United States v. Heller, a case in which Cato was intimately involved, the Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s near total-ban on having guns in the home. Two years later, in McDonald v. Chicago, the Court expanded this protection to the states, striking down Chicago’s equally draconian gun ban.
Ever since those two cases established and expanded the right to keep and bear arms, lawyers have been testing the waters to see how far the Supreme Court’s ruling goes. Hellerheld that the protection of the home with a reasonable firearm (i.e. a handgun, not a rocket launcher) is the core of the Second Amendment. While that right cannot be totally eliminated by states and municipalities, it is still subject to reasonable regulation. Yet this holding only addressed the Second Amendment right to keep arms, not to bear them. Both words are in the Amendment and both words clearly mean different things.
Up until Tuesday, Illinois was the last state to flatly ban all carrying of ready-to-use guns outside the home. Since the mid-1980s there has been a remarkable proliferation of states that offer concealed-carry permits. As you can see from this nifty animation, in 1986 only 34 states allowed their citizens to carry guns. Moreover, most of those states had “may-issue” permitting, meaning that local officials are given broad discretion in choosing who gets a permit. “May-issue” statutes often contain discretionary language such as, “if the sheriff determines the applicant to be of good moral character and of having proper cause for wanting a permit then he may issue a permit.” While “may-issue” laws are better than “no-issue” laws, they imbue local officials with far too much discretion over whether a citizen is of sufficient “moral character” and has “proper cause” to be allowed to exercise her fundamental right to self-defense. In a decision that Judge Posner criticizes in Moore, the Second Circuit recently upheld New York’s “proper cause” provision.
No comments:
Post a Comment