IN THE FIRST five months of this year, 164 people in Chicago were murdered with guns while in the city’s schools last year 258 students were shot, 32 of them dead. That lethal toll is likely to rise with the unfortunate backing by the US Supreme Court of a challenge to the city’s relatively strict curbs on handguns – 10,000 Americans died by handgun violence in the four months that the court took to consider the case.
In McDonald v City of Chicagothe court ruled that the Second Amendment to the US Constitution – "A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed" – is such a central obligation of the Bill of Rights that it to be seen not simply as a requirement on the federal authorities but also on states and local government. The court confirmed that the principles involved in its finding in 2008 against a handgun ban in DC, a federal enclave, in District of Columbia v Helleralso apply to Chicago's ban on private citizens keeping handguns in their homes and it has kicked back to Illinois a decision on the specifics of the local law.
The ruling, like Heller, does not explicitly prohibit all measures taken in the interests of public safety to restrict access to guns. The predictable conservative five-four majority emphasised that the right to keep and bear arms is not "a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose". And it noted its own recognition of prohibitions on carrying firearms in schools or government buildings, bans on possession by convicted criminals, and regulations on gun sales. The decision, applauded by the gun lobby, is likely to trigger further litigation across the country to get the court to set a definitive line in the sand.
The decision was the last in which the court’s retiring liberal, John Paul Stevens, will participate, and minority opinion manages a parting, characteristically eloquent, swipe at the conservative majority’s sympathy for “originalism”, the theory of legal interpretation that tries to base rulings on the original intentions of legislators and has become one of the ideological dividing lines in the court. Meanwhile, in the Senate, President Obama’s nominee as his successor, solicitor general and fellow liberal, Elena Kagan, dodged questions on issues like gun control and abortion, insisting she would not pronounce on issues which the court is likely to have to address. Gun advocates are reassured that, she will not change the court’s balance. America’s arms race will continue.