Dear Mr. 280,
Thank you for contacting me regarding the Supreme Court's review of the District of Columbia v. Heller. I appreciate your comments and having the benefit of your views.
Since 1976, the District of Columbia has banned handguns, and requires rifles and shotguns to be registered, stored unloaded and either locked or disassembled. In the Heller decision in March 2007, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the existing law violates an individual's Second Amendment rights because it "amounts to a complete prohibition on the lawful use of handguns for self-defense."
On February 7, 2008, I signed onto the amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court in support of the Court affirming the Heller decision (previously known as Parker v. District of Columbia) and opposing the District of Columbia law as currently written.
First and foremost, the case poses a very basic question of interpretation of the scope of the rights granted by the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. As you know, the District of Columbia's complete ban of handgun ownership by citizens rests on the legal claim that the Second Amendment does not extend to individuals, but rather pertains only to "well regulated militias."
Legal scholars have debated this issue for many years and a school of thought had developed that asserts the Founding Fathers only carved out the right of gun ownership in the context of the Revolutionary War experience when state militias provided the means to resist British occupation of the colonies. According to this interpretation, the framers did not intend individuals to have any right to bear arms, and thus jurisdictions such as Washington D.C. would be free to ban gun ownership of individuals in their homes.
However, I support a notion shared by leading legal minds of our generation that the scope of the Second Amendment was clearly aimed at individual's rights as well as "organized militias." That is why I signed on to the brief, circulated by Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson of Texas, Representative Mike Ross of Arkansas and Representative Mike Souder of Indiana.
Should you have any additional comments or suggestions, please do not hesitate to contact me in the future. For more information on my views on other issues or to see what I have been working on in Congress, please feel free to visit my official website at
www.house.gov/courtney and sign up for my e-newsletter.
Sincerely,
JOSEPH COURTNEY
Member of Congress
