The Right to Use Firearms (Essay Sample)

The Right to Use Firearms
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The Right to Use Firearms
In the United States, firearm case law is based on Supreme Court decisions, as well as the decisions of other federal courts. These decisions are founded on the Second Amendment, the right of people to bear arms, the federal firearms law, and the Commerce Clause. The 1994 ban on assault weapons was challenged in various courts for breaching, among others, the Commerce Clause and the Equal Protection Clause (Chu & Library of Congress, 2013, p. 9). It is imperative to analyze the disposition of the challenges and examine Second Amendment jurisprudence in view of the Supreme Court’s verdict concerning the case of District of Columbia vs. Heller, as well as the manner in which the lower courts have passed judgment on the prohibition of assault weapons at the local and state level after Heller.
The Second Amendment refers to an amendment in the U.S. constitution that protects the citizens’ rights to bear firearms. While the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that citizens, as well as militias, have the right to own firearms, it has consistently maintained that this right is not unfettered and does not proscribe the regulation of firearms or similar contrivances. The District of Columbia law proscribes the ownership of handguns (Gardner & Anderson, 2014, p. 251). The law proscribes handgun registration and criminalizes the possession of unregistered firearm. In addition, all legally owned firearms must be stored while restrained by a trigger-locking mechanism or in an unloaded and disassembled state except in cases when they are used for legally recognized recreational purposes or in business premises.
Dick Heller, a police officer serving in the District of Columbia, sought to register a handgun that he wanted to keep in his residence. While citing Second Amendment violations, Heller instituted a lawsuit at the Federal District Court in 2008 (Boaz, 2009, p. 330). He was seeking an injunction preventing the enforcement of the prohibition on handgun registration, the trigger-lock prerequisite to the extent that it prohibited firearm use within the home, and the licensing requirement that criminalized carrying a firearm within the home without registration or license. Heller’s grievances were dismissed by the District Court. Similarly, the Court of Appeals, while construing Heller’s grievance as an attempt to seek the right to carry and operate a firearm within his home for self defense, instructed the District court to pass summary judgment in support of the District.
The Supreme Court was of the opinion that Amendment II applied in all federal territories and guarantees the right to bear a firearm for long-established purposes, including self-defense. Accordingly, the Supreme Court declared null and void the provisions of the 1975 FCRA (Firearms Control Regulations Act) and termed such provisions as unconstitutional. In addition, the Court determined that the Second Amendment qualified handguns as “guns”...