WASHINGTON — The Justice Department has declared that the Constitution gives individuals the right to own a gun--a position that largely reverses six decades of federal policy and raises thorny questions about the legality of existing firearms restrictions.
In briefs filed late Monday with the U.S. Supreme Court, the Justice Department rejected the long-held interpretation that the 2nd Amendment guarantees gun rights only to militias, not to individuals.
The department's stance elevates a long-simmering battle between the gun lobby and gun-control advocates to the high court, with Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft and the Justice Department voicing their strongest support yet for the gun lobby.
The National Rifle Assn. applauded the Justice Department's stance, but scholars and gun-control advocates said they were alarmed because they believe the "radical" shift in position threatens to undermine a wide range of gun laws already on the books.
Current state and federal laws subjecting law-abiding citizens to background checks, regulating concealed weapons and banning the purchase of certain guns, such as assault rifles, could all be vulnerable, experts in gun law said.
Since the 1930s, the federal government and the courts have declared almost without exception that people have no constitutional right to own a gun and that the government can thus pass laws restricting who can own a gun and what types of weapons they can own.
But in a pair of pending appeals, the Bush administration asserted for the first time before the Supreme Court that it believes that legal reasoning is flawed.
"The current position of the United States ... is that the 2nd Amendment more broadly protects the rights of individuals, including persons who are not members of any militia or engaged in active military service or training, to possess and bear their own firearms," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson wrote in a footnote to the briefs.
That right, Olson acknowledged, is subject to certain restrictions that allow the government to keep weapons out of the hands of "unfit persons" and to ban certain types of weapons often used by criminals.
Indeed, in one of the cases now pending before the Supreme Court, the department agreed that a Texas man who had a restraining order against him for domestic violence should not be allowed to have a gun.
The Justice Department urged the court to turn down both his appeal and that of a man convicted of violating federal law by owning two machine guns.
