(GunReports.com) — In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Justice Antonin Scalia said there “are some limitations that can be imposed” on the purchase of guns.
Scalia authored the high court’s 2008 opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms and invalidated a D.C. ban on handguns.
Scalia noted that as to more specific restrictions on gun purchases, his opinion said those will have to be decided “in future cases.”
“Some undoubtedly are [permissible], because there were some that were acknowledged at the time” of the writing of the Constitution, he said on “Fox News Sunday.” “So yes, there are some limitations that can be imposed. What they are will depend on what the society understood were reasonable limitations at the time.”
Scalia pointed out that the Second Amendment did not apply to “arms that cannot be hand-carried,” such as cannons.
The conservative justice described, as he has many times before, his “textual” approach to interpreting the Constitution, which requires that its provisions be read according to their meaning at the time of its drafting. New gun restrictions, he said, would be weighed “very carefully.”
“My starting point and probably my ending point will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time,” he said. “They had some limitations on the nature of arms that could be bought. So we’ll see what those limitations are as applied to modern weapons.”
