Arguing that the Supreme Court opened the door toward incorporation of the Second Amendment in its landmark ruling in the Heller case, the Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) has filed an amicus brief in the long-running case of Nordyke v. King, a challenge to the gun-show ban in California’s Alameda County.
Russell Allen Nordyke had been fighting the Alameda County gun-show ban on First Amendment grounds, but a ruling in the case by a district court judge opened up a Second Amendment issue. This is a critical issue for all Americans in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that the Second Amendment protects an individual civil right to keep and bear arms.
Filing the brief on SAF’s behalf before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco is attorney Alan Gura, who successfully argued the Heller case before the high court earlier this year. Noting that “The right to bear arms clearly meets the modern incorporation standard,” Gura’s 33-page brief offers a historical Second Amendment perspective, and dismantles, step-by-step, arguments that the amendment does not apply to the states or local governments.
“It is unfathomable,” Gura writes, “that the states are constitutionally limited in their regulation of medical decisions or intimate relations…but are unrestrained in their ability to trample upon the enumerated right to arms designed to enable self-preservation.”
SAF founder Alan Gottlieb said the brief “covers every argument supporting incorporation in remarkably concise language that is well-supported by court precedent, historical documentation and just plain common sense.
“The Heller ruling defined the Second Amendment as the founders intended,” Gottlieb stated, “and an affirmative ruling in the Nordyke case will help assure that this right properly limits state and local governments from regulating this important civil right into oblivion.”
