Thursday, January 17, 2013

From Slate: The Next Second Amendment War

Building off the assignment below.

After the Newtown shooting, might the Supreme Court look at gun rights differently? The rulings in Heller and McDonald deal with gun rights in the home, but:

. . . there is a hot question bouncing around the lower courts: whether the constitutional right to bear arms, as laid out in Heller and McDonald, extends outside the home. The answer matters especially, but not only, for how tightly the states or Congress can limit people from carrying concealed weapons. Judges are dividing on that question, and the upshot is this: If the Supreme Court wants to stop the recognition of a right to bear arms outside the home, it will have to step up and say so.