According to the AP, a DC handgun ban is still winding its way through the courts. At issue is whether the Second Amendment applies to “a well regulated militia” or to “the people.”

I’d like to refer people to an extensive Reason magazine article I wrote a year and a half ago that mentioned the ban. I said of the Second Amendment:

“The U.S. Supreme Court has never struck down a gun control measure on Second Amendment grounds. In the last Second Amendment case it heard, United States v. Miller (1939), the Court [declined to strike down] a ban on sawed-off shotguns…because “it is not within judicial notice that [such weapons are] any part of the ordinary military equipment or that [their] use could contribute to the common defense.” This ruling certainly suggested that some categories of weapons are legitimate targets of legislation…

“Stephen Halbrook [takes an individual rights view of the Second Amendment]…Halbrook is co-author of Supreme Court Gun Cases, which argues that the high court has repeatedly acknowledged, in cases not directly involving guns, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right. In the 1990 case United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, for example, Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s majority opinion concluded that the phrase ‘the people’–which, Rehnquist noted, appears in the Second Amendment as well as the First, Fourth, Ninth, and 10th amendments–is ‘a term of art’ that ‘refers to a class of persons who are part of a national community.’ Halbrook is also the author of That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right, which makes the case that the Framers understood the Second Amendment as guaranteeing an individual right to arms–a view that has attracted growing support among legal scholars in the last two decades.”

Hat tip: John Lott, who makes the good point that, in the interest of good strategy, gun rights advocates should have waited for another Supreme Court appointment.

Also, John Ashcroft’s report on the Second Amendment was superb.

Robert VerBruggen blogs at http://www.therationale.com and http://robertsrationale.blogspot.com.