Sunday, January 20, 2008

On Jan. 11, the DC Appleseed Center for Law and Justice filed a brief in the Supreme Court, asking the court to uphold the District's gun control law in the case of District of Columbia v. Heller. Our brief was co-sponsored by the D.C. League of Women Voters, the D.C. Chamber of Commerce, the Federal City Council, DC for Democracy and the Washington Council of Lawyers.

All of these local organizations have one key interest in common: They believe that important public policy questions affecting District residents should be decided by local elected officials, not by the federal courts.

In Heller, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down the District's ban on handguns on the grounds that any law banning any single type of "arms" is, necessarily, a violation of the Second Amendment right to bear arms. We believe this is wrong.

Nearly every state has a law banning some type of firearm, such as assault weapons or sawed-off shotguns. And those laws vary not only as to the kinds of arms they ban but in many other ways as well.

There are hundreds of state and local gun control laws. Each of those measures was enacted by local elected officials in response to local needs and desires. And each of those local governments is called on to balance people's desire to possess weapons for self-defense against the obligation to protect public safety.

In the District -- where handgun violence is particularly acute -- our elected mayor and council struck this balance by prohibiting handguns in the home but permitting rifles and shotguns. Congress could have overturned this decision, but it did not.

People in other parts of the country might have struck this balance differently. In fact, many jurisdictions have permitted handguns when the District's elected officials have not.

But the question is not what is the right policy for the District but who should make that policy. The standard the Supreme Court should apply in the pending gun case is whether the District's gun law is reasonable. And "reasonable" means that the law is a reasonable public safety response to the city's handgun violence and protects residents' right to possess other types of arms for self-defense.

The plaintiffs in Heller would prefer a gun control law different from the one enacted by the D.C. Council. But the Supreme Court should not defer to the plaintiffs and use the Second Amendment as a vehicle for federal courts to micromanage gun laws in this country.

Instead, as Justice Anthony Kennedy said in a case we quoted in our brief, local legislatures should be allowed to devise "various solutions" to local problems "where the best solution is far from clear." That is what our mayor and council did. The Supreme Court should uphold their decision.

-- Walter Smith

Washington

The writer is executive director of DC Appleseed, an independent advocacy group.