The District's Gun Ban Goes to Court

This case involves nothing more than the right of law-abiding persons to keep common handguns and usable firearms for lawful self-defense in the home. Accordingly, no purpose would be served by remanding this case for further fact finding or other proceedings.

-- from the brief filed by 55 members of the Senate; the president of the Senate, Vice President Cheney; and 255 members of the House of Representatives

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If private gun ownership were a natural-law right inherited from our colonial mother country, the laws of other Nations sharing our heritage should treat individual gun ownership as a protected activity. But those well-governed, democratic Nations extensively regulate and limit firearm ownership in the service of public safety. . . . [T]he Second Amendment has its origins in the uniquely American tradition of federalism -- and the unique role of state militias in this Nation's early history -- not in some prior common law tradition.

Confronted with the destructive and unlawful use of pistols, England has banned handguns altogether. . . . Parliament has banned semi-automatic rifles, pump-action rifles, and regulated shotguns for decades. And in 1996, after a licensed gun owner massacred 16 school children, Parliament passed a near total ban on handguns. Thus, the Nation that brought us both Blackstone and the English Bill of Rights bans handguns.

Indeed, although the English Bill of Rights remains in effect today, it has not prevented Parliament from enacting regulations that parallel the ones at issue here.

-- from the brief filed by the American Jewish Committee, Anti-Defamation League, Baptist Peace Fellowship of North America and more than two dozen other religious and civic groups

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To limit the right to keep and bear arms to a state regulated militia is to disregard what the Framers understood -- that individual possession of arms is essential to preventing usurpation by the state.

During the 20th Century, more than 70 million people were slaughtered on a massive scale by their own governments after first being disarmed. This pattern repeated itself in Ottoman Turkey (1915-17), the Soviet Union (1929-45), Nazi Germany and Occupied Europe (1933-1945), Nationalist China (1927-1949), Communist China (1949-52, 1957-60, and 1966-70), Guatemala (1960-81), Uganda (1971-79), Cambodia (1975-79) and Rwanda (1994) just to name a few.

In many cases, firearm confiscation followed only after the groundwork was laid by purportedly 'reasonable' regulation and registration of firearms. History illustrates just how readily the standardless 'reasonable' regulation of firearms invites large scale abuse by the state and ultimately paves the way for wholesale confiscation of arms and the mass slaughter of the disarmed.

-- from the brief of Jews for the Preservation of Firearms Ownership