The Supreme Court has refused to hear Silveira v. Lockyer. Hat tip to one of the Volokh’s, who has the scoop.

Update: Via Kevin, comes this article:

The Supreme Court disappointed gun rights groups Monday, refusing to consider whether the Constitution guarantees people a personal right to own a gun.

The court has never said if the right to “keep and bear arms” applies to individuals.

Wrong. It has said that many times. Continuing . . .

Although the Bush administration has endorsed individual gun-ownership rights, it did not encourage the justices to resolve the issue in this case involving a challenge of California laws banning high-powered weapons.

The Bush administration has a history of paying only lip service to gun rights. Bush is as much a friend to gun owners as Clinton was to homosexuals.

And because it happens so much:

The Second Amendment says, “A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

You forgot a couple of commas there guys.

Justices refused without comment to review the 9th Circuit decision.

The Supreme Court continues to avoid issues. It truly has been neutered.

The high court’s last major gun case was in 1939, when justices upheld a federal law prohibiting the interstate transport of sawed-off shotguns.

No it didn’t uphold that. It said that sawn off shotguns had not been proven to relate to the efficacy of a militia.

Kevin has more:

Gun control groups will doubtlessly tout this as “proof” that there’s no individual right to arms, neglecting the fact that that same reasoning would “prove” that there is one, based on SCOTUS’s denial of cert. on U.S. v. Emerson.

So does Clayton Cramer:

Actually, NRA was in opposition to this case going to the Supreme Court. It wasn’t the perfect case, because it involved several different questions:

1. Does the Second Amendment protect an individual right?

2. Does the Fourteenth Amendment incorporate this right against the states?

3. Are assault weapons included among the protected arms?

Any consistent reading of the evidence–including some of the cases that 9th Circuit Judge Reinhardt cited in his nonsensical decision–would answer #3 with YES. Indeed, the Aymette case that Reinhardt relied upon found that only weapons suited to military duty were constitutionally protected for individual ownership. There are many other problems with Reinhardt’s decision.

Supreme Court justices, however, are not required to be honest or consistent, and I suspect that the prospect of striking down California’s useless assault weapon ban would have caused the the Supreme Court to look for some way to uphold California’s assault weapon ban, leading to at least a NO on #2, and perhaps a NO on #1.

Posted in uncategorized on December 1st, 2003 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |