On Tuesday morning, March 18, the Supreme Court
of the United States heard oral argument in District
of Columbia v. Heller, the Second Amendment challenge to Washington,
D.C.’s handgun ban and ban on the use of any firearm for self-defense
in thehome. I was at the counsel table for the pro-rights side—one
of three lawyers there to assist Alan Gura, who would present the
oral argument.
The other two lawyers, Clark Neily (of the public
interest law firm Institute for Justice) and Bob Levy (of the Cato
Institute) had been part of Gura’s team since the case began in 2002.
Unlike Gura, Neily and Levy, I was not representing Mr. Heller or
the other plaintiffs in the case.
I had filed an amicus brief on behalf
of a broad coalition of pro-Second
Amendment police organizations and
district attorneys. When Gura found
out that there would be an extra seat at
the counsel table for oral argument, he
invited me to come along and help.
Representing D.C. was Walter
Dellinger, who had formerly served as
acting solicitor general (the lead Supreme
Court lawyer) in the Clinton administration.
Dellinger had previously argued 29
Supreme Court cases, while this would
be Gura’s first Supreme Court argument.
At exactly 10 a.m., the marshal of
the court announced “Oyez, oyez, oyez,”
and we rose as the justices entered
the courtroom.
Because D.C. had lost the case in
the lower court, Dellinger argued first.
He began by explaining D.C.’s theory of
the Second Amendment—that it has
no practical effect today, for it serves
no purpose other than to protect state
militias, like those of the founding
era, from being disarmed by the federal
government.
Chief Justice John Roberts interjected:
“If you’re right, Mr. Dellinger, it’s
certainly an odd way to phrase the
operative provision. If it is limited to
state militias, why would they say ‘the
right of the people’? In other words, why
wouldn’t they say ‘state militias have the
right to keep and bear arms’?”
Dellinger replied that, to the
Founders, “the militia” included all the
people. Chief Justice Roberts noted that
Dellinger’s point would imply that the
right to arms belongs to all the people.
Justice Anthony Kennedy suggested
that the first clause of the Second
Amendment simply reaffirms the
importance of the militia, but does not
narrow the operative clause. This is a
point made in a grammatical sense in an
amicus brief by George Mason University
School of Law Professor Nelson Lund,
and in a historical sense in the amicus
brief by David Hardy on behalf of
Academics for the Second Amendment.
Shortly thereafter, Justice Kennedy
expressed skepticism about Dellinger’s
ultra-narrow reading of the right to
arms: “It had nothing to do with the
concern of the remote settler to defend
himself and his family against hostile
Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and
bears and grizzlies and things like that?”
Justice Kennedy then followed his
question with the following statement:
“In my view,” the Second Amendment
supplemented the congressional militia
powers in Article I “by saying there’s a
general right to bear arms quite without
reference to the militia either way.”
Justice John Paul Stevens had long
made it clear, in his written opinions,
that he loathed firearms. He pointed out
that in the early state constitutions, only
Pennsylvania and Vermont explicitly
mentioned self-defense as a reason for
the right to arms, whereas others, such
as Massachusetts, mentioned only “the
common defence.”
Justice Stevens led Dellinger into a
discussion of 18th century English judge
and scholar William Blackstone and of
the 1689 English Declaration of Rights,
which Stevens (apparently following the
lead of a brief written by Roger Williams
Law School Professor Carl Bogus and
Ohio State University historian Saul
Cornell) claimed to be a “group right,”
rather than an individual right.
Justice Antonin Scalia noted that
Dellinger’s claim that “bear arms”
was an exclusively military term was
inconsistent with British laws, which
had forbidden Catholics and Scottish
Highlanders to “bear arms.” Those laws
banned gun possession in general, not
merely membership in the militia.
Perhaps recognizing that his
anti-individual rights argument was
weak, Dellinger shifted to a backup
argument: The 42 state constitutions
that recognize an individual right to
arms have a “reasonableness” standard
for gun controls, so D.C.’s handgun ban
is reasonable.
“What is reasonable about a total
ban on possession?” asked Chief
Justice Roberts.
That only handguns are banned,
while rifles and shotguns are still
allowed, Dellinger answered.
The Chief Justice shot back: “So
if you have a law that prohibits the
possession of books, it’s all right if you
allow the possession of newspapers?”
Most of the rest of Dellinger’s initial
presentation was consumed by a long
discussion about machine guns and
“armor-piercing” bullets. Dellinger
argued that the decision of the U.S.
Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
(which declared last spring that the
handgun ban violated the Second
Amendment) meant that machine guns
and “armor-piercing” ammo bans were
unconstitutional. Chief Justice Roberts
and Justice Scalia disagreed, contending
that the lower court’s opinion was
simply about a categorical handgun ban.
Justice Samuel Alito then asked
Dellinger about the D.C. trigger lock law,
which requires all guns in the home
to be locked at all times. Dellinger
conceded that the law, if read literally,
would be unreasonable, but he insisted
that there was an implicit exception that
allowed for self-defense.
Next, Solicitor General Paul
Clement, representing the U.S.
Department of Justice, had 15 minutes
to make his own argument. The brief
that he filed in January explained at
length that the Second Amendment was an individual right. But
it also argued
that the Supreme Court should set an
“intermediate scrutiny” standard of
review for the Second Amendment,
and remand the case back to the
lower court to determine whether
D.C.’s law meets this standard.
Questions from Justice Ruth Bader
Ginsberg suggested that she strongly
endorses the government’s authority
to ban particular types of guns. It was
not clear if the bans she had in mind
were only for machine guns or if she
thought that a handgun ban would
be constitutional.
Justice Kennedy said that the test
from the 1939 case United States v.
Miller (focused on whether a gun
has militia utility) was “insufficient”
to address the Framers’ concerns
“about guns being taken away from
the people who needed them for
their defense.”
Justice Alito wondered how D.C.’s
laws could survive any standard of
review, since they ban the guns most
commonly used for self-defense, and
ban defensive use of all guns.
Chief Justice Roberts said that,
despite the solicitor general’s request
to set an intermediate standard for
judicial review of gun control laws,
there was no need for the Supreme
Court to articulate an intricate
doctrine. (This view was set forth in
the amicus brief authored on behalf
of former u.s. Attorneys General
Edwin Meese III and William Barr
by former Department of Justice
Office of Legal Counsel head Chuck
Cooper.) This would allow the court
to simply declare the handgun ban to
be obviously unconstitutional.
Now it was Gura’s turn. In a series
of five moot courts (practice sessions
for oral arguments) in the previous
two weeks, Gura had been hammered
mercilessly by expert lawyers playing
the role of the Supreme Court justices.
Before the actual Supreme Court,
Gura’s presentation showed how
well he had learned from the moots.
He began by showing the key facts
that would decide part of the case in
our favor: contrary to the claims of
Dellinger and Clement, there was no implicit self-defense exception
to the
trigger lock law because banning selfdefense
was the intent of the law.
Gura pointed out that D.C. had so
admitted, and the District of Columbia
Court of Appeals had agreed, in the
1977 case McIntosh v. Washington,
where the nra had challenged D.C.’s
then-new handgun and self-defense
bans. Further, Gura explained, D.C.
lawyers had formally acknowledged as
an undisputed fact, when the trial court
was hearing the Heller case, that the
trigger lock law banned self-defense.
Justice Stephen Breyer asked a
lengthy question about whether, in light
of the Second Amendment’s primary
purpose of encouraging a citizen army,
and in light of the statistics about
handgun crime, the handgun ban is a
“proportionate” law.
Gura pointed to briefs from retired
generals and other officers (including
nra Secretary Edward J. Land) that
pointed out that the D.C. laws prevent
District residents from acquiring civilian
familiarity with firearms, and that
research has shown that soldiers who
are experienced with guns in civilian life
make much better combat marksmen.
Justice Breyer replied that D.C.
residents can still use rifles at target
ranges in Maryland or Virginia.
Gura then pointed to the many
federal court cases that recognized the
militia utility of handguns.
Justices Ginsberg and Souter propounded
a series of challenging questions,
while Justice Scalia stepped in to
support Gura. Justice Kennedy returned
to his “settler in the wilderness” imagery.
Dellinger had reserved 10 minutes
for rebuttal, and he used all the time
in arguing for the reasonableness of
the D.C. laws. Chief Justice Roberts
expressed skepticism about a crime
victim’s ability to remove a trigger lock
and load a gun in the dark, in the few
seconds after a criminal had broken
into his or her home.
D.C.’s law against carrying guns
actually forbids a person who owns a legal
handgun (a pre-1976 grandfathered one)
from carrying the handgun from one
room to another in his or her own
home. Dellinger could only characterize
the carry law as reasonable by
misstating what it actually says.
Although oral argument had been
scheduled to take 75 minutes in total,
overtime questions to all three of the
lawyers had added an additional
22 minutes—an unusual display of
the Supreme Court’s keen interest in
the subject.
As I headed to the airport in the
afternoon, my talkative cab driver asked
what I had been doing in Washington.
He was an immigrant from Eritrea,
an east African nation that used to be
part of Ethiopia. Before Eritrea won
its independence, it was under the
rule of the genocidal tyrant Mengistu,
whom the cab driver described as an
African Hitler. Yet the cabbie’s tribe, the
Afars, had always been left alone by the
government, he said, because everyone
in the tribe had a rifle, and carried it
wherever he went.
The cab driver was disgusted with
the D.C. law banning handguns and selfdefense
in the home. He told me about
his friend, an Ethiopian immigrant,
who was a landlord. One day, the police
raided a tenant’s apartment, suspecting
the tenant was involved with drugs. The
police also raided the landlord’s home,
and found no drugs, but did find a gun
that the landlord kept for self-defense.
For a year and a half, the landlord
was dragged through the D.C. courts
until, finally, the prayers of his cab driver
friend were answered: a kind-hearted
judge put the landlord on probation,
instead of sending him to jail.
“The American Constitution is
the greatest in the world,” the cabbie
affirmed. “Every country should use it.
The one thing that every American can
give to his children and grandchildren
is the American Constitution.”
Two centuries separate James
Madison from the Eritrean cab
driver. Yet the two men are united
in their passionate love of America’s
constitutional liberty.
After the recent oral arguments in the
D.C. case, I am hopeful that the Supreme
Court will fulfill the hopes of our revered
Founders and of our newest patriotic
citizens by affirming our individual
Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
