CASE ANALYSIS

Case Analysis (District of Colombia vs. Heller) 2nd Amendment

Case Analysis (District of Colombia vs. Heller) 2nd Amendment

Introduction

About thirty years ago, Washington, D.C., passed a law that made it illegal to possess a handgun and mandated that long guns — rifles and shotguns — must be unloaded and either be disassembled or wear trigger locks. One could ask “how can one defend oneself under those circumstances?” Good question! Let's say that you live in Washington, D.C., some villain breaks into your apartment and threatens you and your family. Quick as lightening, you find the key to the trigger lock on your shotgun, unlock it, load a few shells in it, and put enough buckshot into the malefactor that he or she stops (dead or not) threatening you. One way or another, the cops show up and they tell you. “Ok, I see what happened here. You're under arrest.” You protest “Why, I was just defending myself!?” The officer would then say “I know, I'm not arresting you for that. I'm arresting you for unlocking and loading your shotgun.” “But,” you protest “how could I have legally defended myself without doing that?” “Sorry,” says the officer, “that's the law. Let's go!” and off you go into a Kafkaesque nightmare.

The police officer was right. You had the legal right to defend yourself, but if you supplied the means to do it, you were violating the law and if the cops really did show up, you would go to jail. I kid you not! In the following years, we saw that criminals aren't as stupid as we like to think: they realized that people couldn't effectively defend themselves, even in their own homes, and took full advantage of it. The dc crime rate skyrocketed. It swung up a down, as happens everywhere, but it tended to be one of the murder capitals of the country.

Eventually some dc residents got sick of the situation and had the guts to stand up and protest. They sued the city over its restrictions to their rights protected by the Second Amendment. Without going through all of the gory details, the court saw fit to dismiss all of the suits save one, because the court felt that the mere potential to be caught in such a legal bind wasn't sufficient to give them standing to sue. The suit that was not dismissed was brought by a man named Heller, and what got him standing to sue was that he had the cojones to actually attempt to register a prohibited weapon. Heller lost in the lower court, but won in the appeals court. The case is now before the U. S. Supreme Court and is known as District of Columbia v. Heller. (The city is what is called the petitioner, since it lost in the lower-level court and is petitioning the Supreme Court in appeal of that ruling; the petitioner's name always comes first - don't ask me why, I'm not a blood-sucking ...