Supreme Court to hear challenge to Washington, D.C., gun law

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear a challenge to that law from those who say it violates the 2nd Amendment's right to keep and bear arms.

Few would cite D.C.'s gun ban as proof that gun control leads to crime control, as the city continues to have one of the nation's highest rates of violent crime. Even some gun-control advocates don't support it.

The case has drawn wide attention not because of the city's law itself, but because the court may decide for the first time whether gun rights are truly protected by the Constitution, just like the right to free speech or the right to freely practice your religion.

If so, it could mark the beginning of new era in which judges around the country are called upon to decide whether the many restrictions and regulations of weapons infringe the rights protected by the 2nd Amendment.

"Whenever there is an individual right [protected by the Constitution], the burden is on the government to justify a limit on that right," said Robert A. Levy, a libertarian lawyer at the CATO Institute.

An investment advisor who made a fortune and entered law school when he was 51, Levy has led the challenge to the D.C. gun ordinance, even though he lives in Florida and does not own a gun.

"I don't have a personal interest in guns or hunting. What fascinates me is the meaning of the Constitution," Levy said. He believes the 2nd Amendment should stand on the same footing as the 1st Amendment.

If the Supreme Court were to agree, the soft-spoken libertarian will have triggered a revolution in modern constitutional law.

The 1st Amendment's protection for free speech can be both powerful and controversial. Dissidents who burn the American flag in public are shielded from prosecution, the court has ruled, despite state and federal laws that made flag-burning a crime.

By contrast, the justices have said remarkably little about the 2nd Amendment and have never used it to strike down a gun law. Often in the past, the court turned away gun-rights claims and upheld lower-court decisions that treated the 2nd Amendment as protecting only a state's right to maintain a "well-regulated militia."

The amendment says: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."