McDonald v Chicago

5 Key excerpts on "McDonald v Chicago"

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  How America Got Its Guns

  A History of the Gun Violence Crisis

  • William Briggs(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • UNM Press

    (Publisher)

  26 The opinions on both sides used more ink arguing about legal theories than spelling out specific guidelines on admissible restrictions on gun use. Ironically, the decision did not settle the fate of the Chicago gun ban. The case was returned to the Seventh Circuit, where federal judges decided—with little guidance from the Supreme Court—how Chicago would need to modify its gun laws. In June 2014, Chicago’s handgun ban was ruled unconstitutional. The Chicago City Council replaced it with an ordinance placing strict controls on sales of handguns. The ordinance allows sales only in certain parts of the city and outlaws sales at gun shows.

  Many Court analysts forecasted the impact of the McDonald decision on the lower courts: “The dueling of lobbyists will now be replicated by dueling attorneys.”27 “The real action will be in the lower courts, to which fall the grubby tasks of applying the constitutional principles the Supreme Court pronounces.”28 “The Court has put the federal judiciary to the never-ending task of quasi-legislating a gun code.”29 The decision “increases the number of possible constitutional claims, and it also increases the opportunities for litigation.”30 And the decision “is destined to be a virtual full employment act for gun rights lawyers.”31

  For gun rights advocates, the decision was exalting. The NRA’s Wayne LaPierre praised it as “a great moment in American history … a vindication for the great majority of American citizens who have always believed the Second Amendment was an individual right and freedom worth defending.” He continued on a realistic note:

  We are practical guys…. The NRA will work to ensure this constitutional victory is not transformed into a practical defeat by activist judges…. The NRA will not rest until every law-abiding American citizen is able to exercise the individual right to buy and own a firearm for self-­defense or any other lawful purpose.32

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  Guns in American Society

  An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law [3 volumes]

  • Jaclyn Schildkraut, Gregg Lee Carter, Jaclyn Schildkraut, Gregg Lee Carter(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • ABC-CLIO

    (Publisher)

  Justice Sotomayor, who had replaced Justice Souter since the decision in Heller , signed Breyer’s opinion, suggesting that her addition to the Supreme Court did not alter its balance respecting the Second Amendment. The McDonald court divided on the question of the exclusively military meaning of bearing arms along exactly the same lines as it did respecting the impor- tance or otherwise of the militia clause, with Justice Breyer again calling for Heller to be overturned because a strong majority of historians and linguists commenting on Heller have rejected Justice Scalia’s posi- tion that the predominant meaning of bear- ing arms in the late eighteenth century was to carry weapons for purposes of confronta- tion, not necessarily in a military capacity. For the Heller majority and the McDon- ald plurality, the original public under- standing of “keep and bear arms” at the time the Second and Fourteenth Amend- ments were ratified encompassed keeping weapons at the ready for purposes of private self-defense. For the four justices who dis- sented in each case, however, the constitu- tional text does not speak to the question of weapons possession outside the context of service in the lawfully established militia; and this raises the issue of whether a right to armed private self-defense might be implicit in the American constitutional system even if it is not commanded directly by the con- stitutional text. For the dissenters, recogni- tion of a right to private self-defense presents a question entirely analogous to that presented by the issues of constitutional protection for marriage, family relations, 582 | McDonald v. City of Chicago of legal process theory that was dominant on the Supreme Court from the late New Deal through the early 1980s. For Justice Stevens, McDonald afforded an opportunity to offer a final systematic justification of his jurispru- dential philosophy and a detailed critique of Justice Scalia’s contrary jurisprudence.

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  A Pattern of Violence

  How the Law Classifies Crimes and What It Means for Justice

  • David A. Sklansky, David Alan Sklansky(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  That is partly because the kinds of guns in exis- tence today did not exist in the eighteenth century, and neither did professional police forces or the modern military. 27 Heller and McDonald were the culmination of a decades-long campaign by gun rights advocates and the National Rifle Association, beginning in the 1960s, to secure constitutional protection for an individual right to own and use firearms. That campaign succeeded in part because it tapped into a broader cultural change: the rising salience of violent crime. Legal scholar Jonathan Simon has suggested that beginning in the 1960s, American politics were reshaped by growing fears of private violence, which placed new demands not just on elected leaders but also 214 · A P AT T E R N O F V I O L E N C E on constitutional law. Inevitably this influenced how courts thought about the Second Amendment. 28 The Supreme Court’s decisions in Heller and McDonald did not just re- flect heightened concerns about violent crime. They reflected partic- ular ideas about where violence comes from and how it operates. The majority and dissenting Justices in these cases, like the opposing sides in the bitter public arguments about gun control, had different views about the relationship between guns and violence. In a sense the dis- agreements were ultimately about whether gun violence is fundamen- tally situational or dispositional.

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  To Trust the People with Arms

  The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment

  • Robert J. Cottrol, Brannon P. Denning(Authors)
  • 2024(Publication Date)
  • University Press of Kansas

    (Publisher)

  , that incorporated provisions of the Bill of Rights were to be applied to the states with the same rigor that they were applied to the federal government caused the Court to reexamine the question of unanimous juries. In

  2020 the Court in Ramos v. Louisiana reversed the position that it previously held in Apodaca v. Oregon and Johnson v. Louisiana permitting convictions for felonies by less than unanimous juries. After Ramos

  the only provisions of the Bill of Rights that remained unincorporated were the Third Amendment’s prohibition on the quartering of troops in private homes, the Fifth Amendment’s right to a grand jury in criminal cases, and the Seventh Amendment’s right to a jury trial in civil cases.

  McDonald can only be said to have accelerated the processes of fulfilling the vision of Fourteenth Amendment author John Bingham, who intended to make the states respect the Bill of Rights. 93

  But McDonald

  was about more than the Bill of Rights in general. It was specifically about the Second Amendment. What impact would it have on the right to keep and bear arms? One scholar has noted that the Supreme Court’s decision in

  McDonald would bring the constitutional provision into the ambit of “ordinary constitutional law.” After McDonald

  , the old debates about the meaning of the Second Amendment and whether it applied to the states and their various subdivisions were to be put aside. The Second Amendment would become the subject of routine litigation. Given that a right was recognized, what kind of regulation is permissible?

  94

  In the decade following McDonald ,

  the answer from the federal judiciary was that state and local governments would retain a great deal of latitude in firearms regulation. Lower federal courts have produced differing results. The Fourth and Ninth Circuits upheld restrictive licensing schemes, making it difficult for most citizens to get licenses to carry handguns outside the home for protection.

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  America's Gun Wars

  A Cultural History of Gun Control in the United States

  • Donald J. Campbell(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  His house had been broken into three times and his garage twice. McDonald wanted a handgun to carry in the house and to keep in his bedroom at night; the shotguns he owned were simply too unwieldy for nighttime self-defense. He believed that the possibility of confronting homeowners armed with pistols and revolvers might deter thugs and burglars from their lawless activities. 51 However, like Washington, D.C., Chicago had enacted such stringent gun control regulations that it was impossible for Chicagoans to legally own a handgun. Although the city mandated that residents register all firearms, it then refused to accept handgun registrations after passing a 1982 handgun ban. Thus, shortly after Heller struck down the District’s handgun ban, McDonald joined with three other Chicagoans in challenging Chicago’s ban. The Illinois State Rifle Association and the Second Amendment Foundation sponsored the litigation, with Alan Gura, who had successfully argued the Heller case, serving as lead counsel on this case also. 52 At issue was whether Heller’s Second Amendment findings applied only to federal jurisdictions (like the District of Columbia) or whether they also applied to the states and, by extension, to local governments. McDonald and the other plaintiffs argued that the right guaranteed by the Second Amendment was so fundamental and so deeply rooted in the country’s history and traditions that the Court must protect it not just from federal infringement but from state and local government infringement as well; that is, the Court must “incorporate” the Second Amendment, making it as applicable to state and local laws as to federal laws. In a 5–4 decision, the Supreme Court agreed with the plaintiffs that the Second Amendment warranted incorporation, and Justice Samuel Alito (together with Justices Roberts, Scalia, and Kennedy) ruled that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporated the Second Amendment right that Heller recognized

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