Court ruling on D.C. gun ban won’t change Michigan gun laws

Last week the U.S. Supreme Court issued its long-awaited ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller and overturned Washington, D.C.’s ban on handgun ownership. For the first time in our history the court explicitly stated that the Second Amendment makes gun ownership an individual right, leading many to wonder what this ruling means for other gun control measures passed by other states and localities. Short answer: very little.

While the ruling in Heller has been greeted by the National Rifle Association and other gun rights advocates as a major victory for their position, it is in fact a very moderate ruling that directly challenges only the most draconian gun control measures. It should be noted here that the fact that something is declared to be an individual right does not mean that the government can’t restrict the exercise of that right in any way. Even in the case of the First Amendment’s declaration of a right to free speech which Congress may pass no law abridging, we still have libel, fraud and perjury laws that set reasonable restrictions on that right. The test for such a restriction, at its most strict level, is whether the government can show a compelling state interest in the regulation. Thus we outlaw perjury because it violates the right of others to a fair trial, for example.

Justice Antonin Scalia, who wrote the majority opinion in this case, was very careful to state that the ruling does not touch a whole range of reasonable restrictions on gun ownership that are common in this country. He wrote:

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Although we do not undertake an exhaustive historical analysis today of the full scope of the Second Amendment, nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.

We also recognize another important limitation on the right to keep and carry arms. Miller (a 1939 Supreme Court ruling, the first to address the Second Amendment) said, as we have explained, that the sorts of weapons protected were those “in common use at the time.” We think that limitation is fairly supported by the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of “dangerous and unusual weapons.”

This leaves little doubt that the court has no intention of overturning such measures as waiting periods, background checks or bans on fully automatic assault weapons. The D.C. policy was a total ban on handgun ownership rather than a set of reasonable restrictions or a licensing scheme on handgun ownership. This, the court concluded, went too far. So what does this mean for Michigan’s various gun control laws? Not much, actually.

Michigan’s gun laws are quite moderate. The state constitution, in Article 1, Section 6, states,