‘Really hot’ gun hearing to decide ban’s fate

John Payton, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund’s president and director-counsel, says “it will be really hot” Tuesday at the U.S. Supreme Court.

So hot, in fact, that he is not certain he will get a seat when crowds line up to hear oral arguments in the gun-control case, District of Columbia v. Dick Heller.

So hot, that court administrators already have agreed to release audiotapes of the seminal Second Amendment case, practically the moment the justices adjourn after what promises to be a lively debate about what the Founding Fathers were thinking more than 200 years ago with respect to the rights of individual Americans to possess firearms.

This will be the first time the high court has reviewed this amendment in 68 years.

“The government did not take up the first [gun control] case since 1939 to issue a ruling that only applies to D.C., but for much more broader effect,” Mr. Payton said.

That the Heller hearing, which will determine the legality of the District’s 1976 handgun ban, will be hot is about the only thing Mr. Payton and two other panelists agreed upon during yesterday’s American Constitutional Society for Law and Policy forum at the National Press Club.

In what could only be described as a “Hardball” preview to Tuesday’s showdown before the Supreme Court, Mr. Peyton, Roger Williams University law professor Carl T. Bogus and David B. Kopel, research director of the Independence Institute, voiced their respective legal opinions.

It was as if the dais were a judicial bench in a moot court before a jury filled mainly with hastily scribbling reporters and supporters on both sides of the gun debate.

The panelists couldn’t even agree on what the word “tyranny” means, or whether it should apply to government regulations on the Second Amendment at any level.

At one point, moderator Dahlia Lithwick, senior editor and legal correspondent for Slate who writes “Supreme Court Dispatches,” jokingly warned Mr. Bogus that she would allow him to answer a question as long as he didn’t use the word tyranny.

“That seems to get everybody excited,” she said.

Ms. Lithwick’s caution and the dispute over the word tyranny might appear petty to those uninitiated in constitutional law.

But the nitpicking illustrates just how contentious the battle about gun rights is and how both sides are invested in the outcome of this rare test case.

One questioner asked the panelists to “take off your polemic hats for a second and put on your analytical hats” to address whether the Second Amendment guarantees individual or collective, militia-related rights to bear arms.

“The individual rights argument is a creative artifact of the 20th century,” said Mr. Kopel, whose Independence Institute is a nonpartisan, nonprofit public research group based in Colorado.

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