Supreme Court Upholds Broad Reach of Gun Rights

(CBS/AP)  Updated 6:33 p.m. ET

The Supreme Court held Monday that the Constitution's Second Amendment restrains government's ability to significantly limit "the right to keep and bear arms," advancing a recent trend by the John Roberts-led bench to embrace gun rights.

By a narrow, 5-4 vote, the justices also signaled, however, that some limitations on the right could survive legal challenges.

Writing for the court in a case involving restrictive laws in Chicago and one of its suburbs, Justice Samuel Alito said that the Second Amendment right "applies equally to the federal government and the states."

The court was split along familiar ideological lines, with five conservative-moderate justices in favor of gun rights and four liberals opposed. Chief Justice Roberts voted with the majority.

Two years ago, the court declared that the Second Amendment protects an individual's right to possess guns, at least for purposes of self-defense in the home.

That ruling applied only to federal laws. It struck down a ban on handguns and a trigger lock requirement for other guns in the District of Columbia, a federal city with a unique legal standing. At the same time, the court was careful not to cast doubt on other regulations of firearms here.

Gun rights proponents almost immediately filed a federal lawsuit challenging gun control laws in Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park, Ill, where handguns have been banned for nearly 30 years. The Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence says those laws appear to be the last two remaining outright bans.

Lower federal courts upheld the two laws, noting that judges on those benches were bound by Supreme Court precedent and that it would be up to the high court justices to ultimately rule on the true reach of the Second Amendment.

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The Supreme Court already has said that most of the guarantees in the Bill of Rights serve as a check on state and local, as well as federal, laws.

Monday's decision did not explicitly strike down the Chicago area laws, ordering a federal appeals court to reconsider its ruling. But it left little doubt that they would eventually fall.

Still, Alito noted that the declaration that the Second Amendment is fully binding on states and cities "limits (but by no means eliminates) their ability to devise solutions to social problems that suit local needs and values."

The case was McDonald v. Chicago.

The court's conservative wing - led by Justices Samuel Alito, John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, and Antonin Scalia - prevailed in the case.

Justices John Paul Stevens, Steven Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor were in the minority.

A survey conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press in March of this year shows Americans to be split on whether state and local governments should be able to pass laws banning handguns. Forty-five percent said they should be able to do so, but 50 percent said they should not.

In other rulings released Monday:

• The Court has rejected appeals by the Obama administration and the nation's largest tobacco companies to get involved in a legal fight about the dangers of cigarette smoking that has stretched more than 10 years.

The court's action, issued without comment Monday, leaves in place court rulings that the tobacco industry illegally concealed the dangers of smoking for decades. But it also prevents the administration from trying to extract billions of dollars from the industry either in past profits or to fund a national campaign to curb smoking.

In asking the court to hear its appeal, the administration said the industry's half-century of deception "has cost the lives and damaged the health of untold millions of Americans."

The appeal was signed by Elena Kagan, the solicitor general, a couple of months before President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court.

CBSNews.com Special Report: Elena Kagan

• The Court will enter into the nation's charged debate over immigration, agreeing to hear a challenge from business and civil liberties groups to an Arizona law that cracks down on employers who hire undocumented workers.

The justices on Monday accepted an appeal from the Chamber of Commerce, American Civil Liberties Union and others to a lower court ruling that upheld Arizona's law. The measure requires employers to verify the eligibility of prospective employees through a federal database called E-Verify and imposes sanctions on companies that knowingly hire undocumented workers.

•   The Court refused to hear an appeal from the Holy See to stop a lawsuit that accuses the Vatican of transferring a priest from city to city despite repeated accusations of sexual abuse.

Sovereign immunity laws hold that a sovereign state - including the Vatican - generally is immune from lawsuits. But a judge had ruled that there was enough of a connection between the Vatican and the Rev. Andrew Ronan (who was transferred from Ireland to Chicago to Portland, Ore.) for him to be considered a Vatican employee under Oregon law; that ruling was upheld by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in California.

According to court documents, Ronan began abusing boys in the mid-1950s as a priest in the Archdiocese of Armagh, Ireland. He was transferred to Chicago, where he admitted to abusing three boys at St. Philip's High School. Ronan later was moved to St. Albert's Church in Portland, where he was accused of abusing the person who filed the lawsuit now under appeal. Ronan died in 1992.

•   The court struck down part of the anti-fraud law enacted in response to Enron and other corporate scandals, but said its decision has limited consequences.

Under the 2002 the Sarbanes-Oxley law, Congress created the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board to replace the accounting industry's own regulators amid scandals at Enron Corp., WorldCom Inc., Tyco International Ltd. and other corporations. The board has power to compel documents and testimony from accounting firms, and the authority to discipline accountants.

The justices voted 5-4 that a provision of the law violates the Constitution's separation of powers mandate. Sarbanes-Oxley will remain in effect, but the Securities and Exchange Commission now will be able to remove board members at will.

•   The court rejected an appeal by the publisher of a financial newsletter found guilty of securities fraud. Pirate Investor LLC (now known as Stansberry and Associates Investment
Research) and Frank Porter Stansberry had sold a report purporting to offer a "Super Insider Tip" relating to a still-unannounced deal between USEC, an American company that enriches uranium and the Russian government.

In 2002 Stansberry wrote a newsletter saying he had interviewed a company executive who told him to watch their stock on May 22; the executive later denied saying that, but the e-mail solicitation predicted USEC's stock price would more than double. Stansberry's company made hundreds of thousands of dollars from selling reports. Within two weeks trading in shares of USEC rose from 189,000 shares a day to an average of 3.3 million.

News organizations, including The Associated Press, said the prosecution is in violation of the First Amendment. But federal judges have upheld the conviction.

•   An ideologically split court ruled that .

The Christian Legal Society had sued to get funding and recognition from the University of California's Hastings College of the Law, whose policy said no recognized campus group may exclude people due to religious belief or sexual orientation.

The court on a 5-4 judgment upheld lower court rulings that CLS's First Amendment rights of association, free speech and free exercise were not violated by the college's decision to deny recognition and funding.

Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg wrote that CLS "seeks not parity with other organizations, but a preferential exemption from Hastings' policy."

In his dissent. Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the college's decision was aimed at preventing any freedom of expression "that offends prevailing standards of political correctness."

[verypublishedwriter]

The rate of firearm deaths among kids under age fifteen is twelve
times higher in the United States than in the other twenty-five
largest developed countries combined. American kids are sixteen times
more likely to be murdered with a gun, eleven times more likely to
commit suicide with a gun, and nine times more likely to die from a
firearm accident than children are in the other twenty-five biggest
industrialized countries combined. Every single hour, two American
kids are killed by guns. Every day, nearly 100 Americans die from gun
violence. Nearly 13,000 people are murdered with guns every year in
the United States. (Compare that number with these from nations with
strict gun control laws: Canada, 150; England, 50; Australia, 50;
Japan, 19.)


For more than 100 years the use of guns has been romantically
presented in movies. For longer than fifty years gun violence has
been glorified on television shows. For almost thirty years the same
has been true for the way gun violence has been depicted in video
games. During this same period of time, guns have come to be abused
in increasingly casual ways.


Part of the message of romantic violence is that if a powerless person
gets a gun, that gun can make him feel powerful. This is not a
message we need to teach with weapons that easily kill and maim.

[verypublishedwriter]

Between 1979 and 2009, gun violence killed more than 120,000 children
and teenagers in America. Every year since the 1970s, more children
and teenagers have died from gun violence than from cancer, pneumonia,
flu, asthma, AIDS, and all other natural causes combined.

[verypublishedwriter]

Political assassinations were almost unheard of before the advent of
the gun. As the use of guns became more and more widespread, so did
assassinations. World War I was started by a political assassination
when, in July 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was shot and
killed with a handgun. Other assassinations have changed the
direction of nations and halted political and social reform movements.
With the proliferation of the gun, formerly powerless peasants had
the ability to become powerful in a moment, simply by pulling a
trigger.


Four U.S. Presidents have been assassinated, including Abraham Lincoln
and John F. Kennedy. All four of these presidents were killed with
guns. There have been gun assassination attempts on many other
presidents; these attempts have been unsuccessful. Gun assassinations
have killed some of the best, most interesting and most influential
people in the world, including non-violent political activists Mahatma
Gandhi and Martin Luther King.


Political and social leaders are, of course, not the only people who
have been killed in peacetime by guns. The United States has had,
from its very beginnings, a very intimate relationship with guns. In
fact, many people in many other countries around the world consider
Americans to be gun crazy.

[verypublishedwriter]

The United States has the least restrictive gun laws of any of the world's industrialized nation. It's not coincidental that we also have the highest murder rates.

Nearly 13,000 people are murdered with guns every year in
the United States. Compare those numbers with these from nations with
strict (translation: sane) gun control laws: Canada, 150; England, 50; Australia, 50; Japan, 19.

[verypublishedwriter]

More people are murdered with guns in the U.S. each year than in the other 25 largest industrialized nations combined. And this has been the case since the 1970s. It seems to me that we shouldn't pretend to be a civilized nation until we become less gun crazy, until we enact serious and dramatic gun control laws.

Progessives: Get out and vote this November. It's long past time for this nation to take the lead on not only gun control but on forward-moving, vibrant anti-global warming initiatives, on substantive educational reform, on deep, anti-greed financial reform.

[curse914]

Mortar, I understand that and I disagree. The statement infers some supreme law, and there is none. The laws are those upon which we agree. Their is no divine providence, society is a constructs of men as much as God is a construct of men.

[infantryman1968]

Supreme Court Upholds Broad Reach of Gun Rights
Justices Rule that Constitutional Provision Can't Be Impeded by State or Local Laws

LOL!

Obama and his followers lose big time on this. Just read their posts!

[rationall7]

A victory for the Militas is a victory for Communists & Nazis.

In France the equivalent term "Milice" has become tainted due to its use by notorious collaborators with Nazi Germany.[citation needed]


The national police forces in several former communist states such as the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact countries, but also in the non-

[hamsterattack]

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You know republicans, that LONG BARREL GUN doesn't make up for your TINY WIENER!!!!!!!

You know republicans, that LONG BARREL GUN doesn't make up for your TINY WIENER!!!!!!!

You know republicans, that LONG BARREL GUN doesn't make up for your TINY WIENER!!!!!!!

You know republicans, that LONG BARREL GUN doesn't make up for your TINY WIENER!!!!!!!

[sannyliang]

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