More on Parker v. District of Columbia

After rereading what I wrote, I think my original take on the Parker v. District of Columbia appeals decision (full PDF file available here), which overturned some of the capital city's more-severe gun restrictions on Second Amendment grounds, underplays the importance of the decision. After all, this was the first federal court decision to overturn limits on the right to bear arms because such limits are unconstitutional. That's a big deal.

I continue to believe that the decision was a moderate one. While recognizing that the Second Amendment protects individual rights, the court left the door open for fairly intrusive regulation of those rights, including such controversial and potentially dangerous requirements as gun registration, which many liberty-minded people would never obey. That's a far cry from wiping away the nation's gun control laws, since few jurisdictions impose restrictions as draconian as those enforced in the District of Columbia, which amount to outright abrogations of individual rights.

But while the court's decision was moderate, it stands in stark contrast to a history of immoderate positions taken by government officials, including judges. After decades of bogus claims that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to organize militias, and that it is nothing more than an archaic artifact, since the National Guard replaced those militias, it's nothing short of revolutionary to see a federal appeals court rule that the Second Amendment means what it says.

The decision is likely to have an effect only in those few places -- D.C., New York City, Chicago, etc. -- that go beyond regulating the right to bear arms to explicitly preventing its exercise. And it will only have an effect in most of those places if its reasoning is adopted by other courts of appeal, or if the Supreme Court endorses the D.C. court's position. In most of the country, laws are less restrictive than the court would allow, and an individual right to bear arms is implicitly assumed by local lawmakers.

In fact, the D.C. decision may strengthen the hand of gun-controllers in an odd way. By taking absolute bans off of the table, the decision may alleviate the concerns of millions of gun owners who have, so far, seen every restriction as a step toward ultimate confiscation. Restrictions are more palatable to many people when they know those restrictions can only go so far and no farther.

It's enlightening, therefore, to see the howls of outrage coming from fans of gun restrictions. For example, a Brady Campaign press release complained: "By disregarding nearly seventy years of U.S. Supreme Court precedent, two Federal judges have negated the democratically-expressed will of the people of the District of Columbia and deprived this community of a gun law it enacted thirty years ago and still strongly supports."

But the only laws taken off the table by the appeals court are explicit bans on firearms. That makes it wonderfully clear that the Brady Campaign isn't about restricting guns so much as it's about completely disarming people -- the law-abiding ones, that is.

If nothing else, the appeals court decision really put everybody's cards on the table.