The U.S. Supreme Court and the Second Amendment

Feb. 10--New York City restricts the ability of gun owners to transport their weapons outside the city, and this fall, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide if those rules violate the Second Amendment. The case has the potential to topple an assortment of local and state gun laws across the United States. The impact on California, which has more gun regulations on the books than any other state, could be volcanic. The reason state and local gun laws are at risk, or, put another way, the reason that gun rights could be strengthened, is that the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, has only recently been interpreted by the Supreme Court to protect an individual's right to keep and bear arms. And it was even more recently that the justices declared Second Amendment rights to be "fundamental" to liberty and therefore binding on the states through the Fourteenth Amendment, which bars any state from denying liberty to any person without due process of law. The first case was District of Columbia v. Heller, decided in 2008. The second case was McDonald v. Chicago, decided in 2010. Another interesting case is Maxwell v. Dow, decided in 1900. Bank robber "Gunplay" Maxwell complained that Utah had denied his Sixth Amendment right to trial by jury, but the Supreme Court ruled that it had been "many times decided" that the first 10 amendments "were not intended to and did not have any effect upon the powers of the respective states." Any fan of TV police dramas from "Dragnet" forward would have to wonder how state governments could ignore well-known constitutional rights. The answer is that unlucky "Gunplay" Maxwell's case was 25 years before the U.S. Supreme Court began its piecemeal process of selecting certain provisions of the Bill of Rights and

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