DIVIDE OR CONQUER
tion, made it clear to Gura and to
Bob Levy, a senior fellow at the
libertarian Cato Institute who financed the Heller case, that it did
not support their plan.
From the NRA’s perspective,
there were not enough reliable
votes among the nine justices back
then supporting an individual’s
right to bear arms. “In that scenario, why would you take the risk
of losing the Second Amendment
case at the Supreme Court?” Klukowski asked. “Why wouldn’t you
keep working towards a day when
there were five reliably conservative votes on the court?”
When Gura finally prevailed six
years later in a 5-4 decision, two of
those votes came from newly appointed conservative justices. Still,
the relationship between Gura and
the NRA never recovered.
Klukowski said he believes the
Heller and McDonald rulings mark
the beginning of what could be decades of intense litigation over the
scope of gun rights in America.
“Whether the Second Amendment blossoms into something with
the force and the scope of the First
Amendment — or becomes a very
narrow civil right without much
practical significance — that entirely remains to be seen,” he said.
HUFFINGTON
04.07.13
Either way, legal scholars agree
that the next big gun case before
the Supreme Court is likely to address the right to carry firearms
in public, an issue that the high
court has yet to rule on.
“They’ve said you can have a
gun, and you can have a gun in
“OUR FEELING IS STRIKE WHILE
THE IRON IS HOT AND BUILD
AS MUCH CASE LAW AS YOU CAN.”
your home,” Winkler said of the
court’s rulings to date, “so the
logical next step is to see where
else you can have one.”
“The next great battle in the
war over the Second Amendment
is going to be who gets to argue
concealed carry rights,” Winkler
said. “Getting that case to the Supreme Court is going to be huge.”
In February, the circuit courts
teed up the issue for the justices
by creating a split: The full 7th
Circuit declined to preserve an Illinois law barring concealed carry,
while the 10th Circuit declared
concealed-carry bans to be constitutional. The Second Amendment
Foundation is involved
in both disputes.