Supreme Court returns to firearms fray

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Supreme Court announced Wednesday it will return to the controversy over individual gun rights by hearing an appeal from a group of firearms owners in Chicago.

They are challenging a lower appeals court ruling that said the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to guns only in the face of federal regulation, not against state and municipal restrictions.

Included among 10 new disputes the justices added to their calendar Wednesday for the upcoming 2009-10 term, which begins next Monday, the guns case brings the court back to a sensational topic that pits uniquely American notions of frontier liberty against contemporary worries over urban violence.

When the justices heard a case on the subject in March 2008, people began lining up in front of the court's columned building two days early for a seat.

The new dispute began in Chicago, which has a handgun ban similar to a Washington, D.C., ordinance that the Supreme Court struck down in June 2008 as a violation of the Second Amendment. In the 2008 case, District of Columbia v. Heller, the Supreme Court for the first time declared an individual right to firearms for self-defense and rejected a prevailing lower court view that the Second Amendment applied only to state "militia," such as National Guard units.

But the 5-4 decision left open a crucial question that could have more practical consequences for gun owners and for the states that would regulate them: Does the Second Amendment apply to the states and localities as it does to federal jurisdiction of Washington, D.C.?

Because the Supreme Court has so rarely taken up Second Amendment cases, the amendment's coverage in the states has never been fully determined — unlike the breadth of many of the other of the first 10 amendments to the Constitution, known as the Bill of Rights.

Thirty-four states had asked the Supreme Court to take up the gun advocates' appeals and a separate one filed by the National Rifle Association against Chicago. (The justices did not act on that petition Wednesday.)