In a 7 to 4 ruling yesterday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in California decided that the Second Amendment does not extend beyond the home for residents of the 9th Circuit (Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, Oregon and Washington). “The government may regulate, and even prohibit, in public places — including government buildings, churches, schools and markets — the open carrying of small arms capable of being concealed, whether they are carried concealed or openly,” Judge Jay Bybee declared. While there is no new law restricting open or concealed carry at this time, the court indicated that states have the authority to restrict citizens’ right to bear arms.
A ‘Mere Inkblot’
“Today, a majority of our court has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says,” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain (one of the dissenters) wrote in response to the ruling. “Instead, the majority holds that while the Second Amendment may guarantee the right to keep a firearm for self-defense within one’s home, it provides no right whatsoever to bear — i.e., to carry — that same firearm for self-defense in any other place.”
“This holding is as unprecedented as it is extreme,” the judge continued. “[W]e now become the first and only court of appeals to hold that public carry falls entirely outside the scope of the Amendment’s protections.”
O’Scannlain went on to further declare that the unfavorable ruling “reduces the right to ‘bear Arms’ to a mere inkblot” and undermines the Constitution, half a millennium of legal history, the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in District of Columbia v. Heller and the foundational principles of American popular sovereignty itself.
Self-Defense Doesn’t Matter Outside Your Home
Besides undermining everything we stand for as Americans, the court is effectively saying that a gun isn’t needed for protection outside of a person’s home. This couldn’t be further from the truth, as demonstrated when Mychael Waller was forced to defend the life of his son and himself in the streets of Chicago, David Jackson III defended himself and others in a South Carolina barbershop, a mother defended her son against robbers in Atlanta or a bar employee stopped a shooting spree in Utah … the list goes on. These are not one-off incidents. They do and will happen, and if these individuals mentioned would not have been armed, they and others would have surely ended up injured or dead.
This ruling is another attempt to chip away at gun owners’ rights. Hopefully, the U.S. Supreme Court will intervene and uphold the Second Amendment.
