Must guns stay at home?

WASHINGTON – The Second Amendment’s “right to keep and bear arms” is proving to be a right to keep a gun at home, but so far not a right to bear a loaded firearm in public.

The Supreme Court breathed new life into the amendment when it struck down strict handgun bans in Washington and Chicago and spoke of the “inherent right of self-defense.”

But to the dismay of gun rights advocates, judges in recent months have read those decisions narrowly and rejected claims from those who said they had a constitutional right to carry a loaded gun on their person or in their car. Instead, these judges from California to Maryland have said the “core right” to a gun is limited to the home.

Now, the National Rifle Association is asking the high court to take up the issue this fall and “correct the widespread misapprehension that the Second Amendment’s scope does not extend beyond the home.”

Stephen Halbrook, an NRA lawyer, said “some judges have buried their heads in the sand and have refused to go one step further” than saying there is a right to have a gun at home.

The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence hailed the trend and called the high court’s rulings a “hollow victory” for gun enthusiasts. “The gun lobby has tried to expand (the Second Amendment) into a broad right to carry any type of gun anywhere. And they have been almost unanimously rejected by the courts,” said Jonathan Lowy, director of legal action. He conceded, however, that “this battle is far from over.”

The uncertainty began with the Supreme Court itself. In 2008, Justice Antonin Scalia said the history of the Second Amendment shows it “guarantees the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” But other parts of his 5-4 opinion stressed there is no right to “carry any weapon in any manner,” and that bans on concealed weapons were lawful in the 19th century.

Since then, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed to challenge gun restrictions. In California, federal judges in San Diego and Yolo counties rejected suits from law-abiding gun owners who were denied “concealed carry” permits.

“The Second Amendment does not create a fundamental right to carry a concealed weapon in public,” U.S. District Judge Morrison England ruled in May.

“That’s the cutting-edge issue: whether the Second Amendment applies outside the home,” said Chuck Michel, an NRA lawyer in Long Beach, Calif., who has appealed the question to the U.S. 9th Circuit.

State judges in Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts and New York have also ruled recently that there is no constitutional right to carry a loaded gun for self-defense. And in Virginia, the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the federal conviction of a man who fell asleep in his car with a loaded gun.