A win for the living
In a hearteningly sweeping decision, a federal appeals court delivered a blow to the openended gun-rights absolutism that now grips leaders at both ends of Pennsylvania Ave. The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., ruled Tuesday that the Second Amendment notwithstanding, government can impose sane restrictions on the style and lethality of firearms that citizens seek to purchase — at least when those guns are “exceptionally lethal weapons of war.”
At issue was a 2013 Maryland law, passed in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., mass murder of 20 first-graders and seven adults by Adam Lanza, who killed with aid of a Bushmaster semiautomatic assault rifle and 30-round, high-capacity magazines.
The law banned AR-15 or AK-47 assault-weapons and the sale and transfer of magazines carrying more than 10 rounds.
Gun-rights advocates howled that the individual right to bear arms could under no circumstances be infringed.
Cooler heads pointed out that the right has never been limitless — there’s no private right to own shoulder-fired rocket launchers — and that the landmark 2008 Heller vs. District of Columbia decision gives governments wide latitude to impose sane regulations on firearm purchases.
Wrote Judge Robert King, speaking for the 10-4 court majority: “We are convinced that the banned assault weapons and large-capacity magazines are among those arms that are ‘like’ ‘M-16 rifles’ — ‘weapons that are most useful in military service’ — which the Heller Court singled out as being beyond the Second Amendment’s reach.”
The decision should be especially heartening for the Newtown victims families who, swimming upstream against a federal law that immunizes gunmakers, seek to hold those who market assault rifles liable for selling combat-grade killing machines.
The federal courts being what they are, and the likes of the NRA being deeply entrenched in the executive and legislative branches, this is far from the last word.
The ruling only carries weight in Maryland, North and South Carolina, and Virginia and West Virginia. An appeal will inevitably make it to the Supreme Court in the near future.
That said, this decision gives gun safety advocates hope that state laws can stem the American carnage — to borrow a phrase from a recent inaugural address — assault weapons have unleashed on innocents.