D.C. Asks Supreme Court to Back Gun Ban

The Supreme Court has not specifically addressed the gun rights guarantees of the Second Amendment since 1939, when it upheld a federal gun control law and seemed to side with the "collective" right argument.

The Second Amendment provides: "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."

The appeals court's decision to focus on "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed"rather than "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State'' reflects a growing trend in the legal and academic community.

So while the District argues in its petition that the appeals court decision ignored the "obvious military character" of the Second Amendment's language, it spends more time making the case that its law should be upheld even if a majority of the justices embrace the individual rights theory.

Its legal filing contends that the Second Amendment was meant to protect the states from federal intervention, not to restrict their legislative decisions. "States remain free to regulate arms within their boundaries so long as they do not thereby deprive the United States of the ability to obtain the assistance of an armed citizenry in time of need," the petition states.

And the petition says the high court should recognize that banning handguns, which it calls the criminal's "weapon of choice," was a reasonable response in an urban area marked by high crime rates.

District lawyers argue that the ability to own shotguns and rifles satisfied the desire of the law's challengers for a means of self-protection. The appeals court found that argument "frivolous."

The petition also includes a long list of statistics it says bolsters its claims that the availability of handguns increases the number of suicides and endangers children and police officers. "No other provision of the Bill of Rights even arguably requires a government to tolerate serious physical harm on anything like the scale of the devastation worked by handguns," it states.

Although the case decided by the appeals court was called Parker v. District of Columbia, District lawyers have filed their petition as District of Columbia v. Dick Anthony Heller. That is because the appeals court found that Heller, a security guard, was the only one of the six plaintiffs who had legal standing to challenge the law. His application for a handgun permit was denied by the government.