“Ahhh ‘Heller’ No!” Hillary Shot Down by John Lott

THE FEDERALIST notes how the Supreme Court described the facts of the case:

District of Columbia law bans handgun possession by making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and prohibiting the registration of handguns; provides separately that no person may carry an unlicensed handgun, but authorizes the police chief to issue 1-year licenses; and requires residents to keep lawfully owned firearms unloaded and dissembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device. Respondent Heller, a D. C. special policeman, applied to register a handgun he wished to keep at home, but the District refused. He filed this suit seeking, on Second Amendment grounds, to enjoin the city from enforcing the bar on handgun registration, the licensing requirement insofar as it prohibits carrying an unlicensed firearm in the home, and the trigger-lock requirement insofar as it prohibits the use of functional firearms in the home. The District Court dismissed the suit, but the D. C. Circuit reversed, holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess firearms and that the city’s total ban on handguns, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional even when necessary for self-defense, violated that right.

No mention of toddlers.

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JOHN LOTT’S article responding to Hillary Clinton’s claims in the 3rd Presidential debate in regards to the 2nd Amendment and the Heller Case:

…The 2008 Heller decision struck down Washington, D.C.’s complete ban on handguns.  Before the decision, people in the District could own a rifle or a shotgun, it was a felony to load the gun. This amounted to a complete ban on guns, and the Supreme Court said that Washington went too far.

But then, on Wednesday night, Clinton suggested that Wallace had misunderstood her statement.

She explained: “I support the Second Amendment… I disagreed with the way the court applied the Second Amendment in that case because what the District of Columbia was trying to do was to protect toddlers from guns. And so they wanted people with guns to safely store them.”

But the Supreme Court did nothing at all to stop safe-storage laws. And the Justices that Clinton promises to appoint to the High Court will, in all likelihood, again make it possible for the government to ban guns.

As to the storage laws, the Heller decision couldn’t have been clearer: “Nor, correspondingly, does our analysis suggest the invalidity of laws regulating the storage of firearms to prevent accidents.”  If the ruling contributed to the problem that Clinton describes, one would think that there would have been a lot of accidental gun deaths involving toddlers.  But there doesn’t appear to have been a single accidental gun death of any kind in the District, let alone for toddlers, during the eight years since the Heller decision was announced.

The only gun laws that the Supreme Court has struck down have been complete bans on guns. Let me repeat this: If Clinton’s judicial appointments vote to overturn Heller, governments will again be able to ban guns.

And this is a real possibility. Heller can be overturned with just one more appointment to the court.

The Supreme Court is currently tied 4-4 on the meaning of the Second Amendment.

Right now, all four liberal justices have made it clear that they believe in the government’s right to completely ban guns.

In 2010, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: “I can find nothing in the Second Amendment’s text, history, or underlying rationale that could warrant characterizing it as ‘fundamental’ insofar as it seeks to protect the keeping and bearing of arms for private self-defense purposes.”

This decision will ensure that many Americans will face gun bans. With the change in the Supreme Court, the District of Columbia and some cities will quickly move to ban guns.

California has already banned over 12,000 models of handguns since 2001, with only a dozen that can still be sold in the state and even those likely banned within a few years.

If Clinton becomes president, all handguns in California will likely soon be banned.

[….]

That Hillary Clinton won’t honestly tell American’s what she intends to do if she becomes president, shows that she is concerned that many Americans do support gun ownership.  But regardless of whether or not she openly acknowledges her plans, the threat that she poses is still very real.