From the Harvard Law Review: Does the Second Amendment Protect Firearms Commerce? Defending the right to sell and trade arms

The Second Amendment refers to the right to keep and bear arms. The first of Obama's executive orders on guns places requirement on gun dealers, which is slightly different. They have to be licensed and they must perform background checks. I'm looking around for thoughts on whether these are reasonable regulations that do not limit general Second Amendment rights, but first I hunted for info on whether the Second Amendment and found the following. The author argues that the right to sell and trade arms is interwoven with the right to keep and bear them. He refers to good number of nuanced cases following DC v Heller. None of these have reached the Supreme Court.

I'm tempted to list them in a separate post - that depends on how much energy I have,

I don;t see a lot on the other side, but I'll keep looking. This article is part of a forum. You'll find other thoughts on random Second Amendment issues at the bottom of the page.

- Click here for the whole thing.

Precedents involving other constitutional rights show that businesses that provide constitutionally related services have standing in their own right to challenge statutes that injure them. For example, in Planned Parenthood v. Danforth,28 abortion providers were held to have standing to challenge a statute that criminalized some of the ways in which they provided abortion services.29 They did not need to invoke the third-party abortion rights of their patients. Indeed, it has long been observed, including by Justice Harry Blackmun, that the rights of doctors were central to Roe v. Wade.30

Likewise, in American Booksellers Association v. Hudnut,31 booksellers themselves successfully brought a First Amendment challenge to an Indianapolis ordinance that criminalized their sale of what the ordinance called “pornography.”32 The booksellers did not need to rely on the customers’ rights as book buyers, but instead asserted their own First Amendment rights. The Supreme Court summarily affirmed the decision.33
On the merits, the abortion doctor plaintiffs in Planned Parenthood were partially successful, and the bookseller plaintiffs in American Booksellers Association were completely successful. The key point is that these providers of constitutionally protected goods and services had constitutional rights, and their particular claims were entitled to be tested under the strict standards that apply to restrictions on constitutional rights.

Besides invoking their own rights, businesses can also raise the third-party constitutional rights of their customers. For example, the beer vendor in Craig v. Boren34 could raise the equal protection rights of its customers against a state law that set different drinking ages based on sex.35 The principle goes back to Pierce v. Society of Sisters36 in 1925, where the owners of religious schools had standing to raise the constitutional rights of their students and families, successfully bringing a Fourteenth Amendment challenge against a state law that forbade all private K–12 schools.37