On Friday, 20 amicus briefs were filed in support of the District of Columbia government, in the case challenging the District’s ban on handguns and on functional firearms. The briefs are here.
Most notably, the Solicitor General asked that the decision of the Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia be reversed and remanded. Details are in Jonathan Adler’s post, below.
If not for the massive volunteer work of persons concerned about the Second Amendment, George W. Bush would not have won the very close elections of 2000 and 2004. To state the obvious, the citizen activists would never have spent all those hours volunteering for a candidate whose position on the constitutionality of a handgun ban was “Maybe.”
The SG brief was one that might have been expected from the administration of President John Kerry. As a Senator, Kerry voted for a resolution affirming the individual Second Amendment right, and also voted for more repressive gun control at every opportunity.
The 2004 Bush victory over Kerry made a great difference in the US posture at the 2006 UN gun control conference, and in the signature of the Protection of Lawful Commerces in Arms Act. The election does not appear to have made a difference in the management of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms & Explosives, or of the Office of the Solicitor General.
In the Comments below, there will be some people who want to engage in a troll-driven debate over the gun issue in general, and others who will want to criticize or praise the Bush administration for the SG brief. However, I encourage readers instead to read one of more of the amicus briefs in toto, and to offer thoughtful comments on the brief. Further, if you find factual errors, misleading statements, or erroneous citations in one of the amicus briefs, please point them out, and, if possible, provide any additional citation supporting your claim; please confine such error correction to narrow points, rather than broad argument over the thesis of a brief.
Update: Interviewed by Glenn and Helen Reynolds this weekend, Rudy Giuliani declared that he supported the individual rights Second Amendment, “as interpretted by the Parker decision.” The comment would seem to put him at odds with the position of the Bush administration, whose brief claims that Parker was wrong as a matter of law, and should be reversed and remanded.