Second Amendment Roundup: Supreme Court Considering Arms Ban Petitions on Friday
The Supreme Court has distributed two important cases for its conference of January 10. One is Snope v. Brown, which concerns whether Maryland may ban semiautomatic rifles that are in common use for lawful purposes. The other is Ocean State Tactical v. Rhode Island, which asks whether a retrospective, confiscatory ban on the possession of ammunition feeding devices that are in common use violates the Second Amendment.
The Court should grant the petitions for writs of certiorari. The cases present a critically important question going to the heart of the Second Amendment – may the government prohibit mere possession of AR-15s and similar semiautomatic rifles and of standard magazines that come with most semiautomatic rifles and pistols?
As I explained in my recent post “Firepower and the Fourth Circuit,” Maryland’s prohibition on AR-15s and the like rifles was upheld en banc on the merits under reasoning in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s precedents. Likewise, the First Circuit’s affirmance of the denial of a preliminary injunction against the Rhode Island ban follows the same trend by certain circuit courts flaunting even the most recent of the Court’s rulings.
For most of the Nation’s history, long guns – rifles and shotguns – were seen as good, while handguns were depicted by some as bad. The muskets fired at Lexington and Concord became a symbol of American freedom. Restrictions on the carrying of concealed pistols arose in the nineteenth century. New York’s Sullivan Law of 1911 required a permit just to keep a handgun in the home. But as the New York court explained in People v. Raso (1958), “a rifle may be possessed in the home or carried openly upon the person on the street without violating any law,” since in restricting concealed weapons, the legislature “carefully avoided including rifles because of the Federal constitutional provision and [NewYork’s] Civil Rights law provision.” I personally heard Justice Scalia tell how, when he was on the high school rifle team, he carried his rifle on the New York subway.
The initial bill that became the National Firearms Act of 1934 listed pistols and revolvers first among the firearms that would be subject to registration. Attorney General Homer Cummings depicted them as the ultimate gangster weapons, but they were removed from the Act as passed.
Repeating rifles with magazines holding numerous cartridges had been around since the mid-nineteenth century in the form of lever-actions. Semiautomatic rifles with detachable magazines were on the market by the turn of the century. Virtually
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