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Does the 2nd Amendment restrict the right to own handguns?

For the first time in 70 years, the U.S. Supreme Court will take on the question of whether individual Americans have the right to keep and bear arms or whether it's a "collective right" of the people for service in a state militia.

That question, which Justices will hear argued on Tuesday, is at the heart of a long, impassioned debate about how much power the government has to keep people from owning guns. The high court will likely decide by June whether Washington D.C.'s strict ban on handguns is constitutional. A lower court tossed out the ban last year.

Should law-abiding Americans have unfettered access to handguns? What limits, if any, should government place on gun ownership? Is the Second Amendment under fire?

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Ben likes: D.C. gun ban proponents ignore the facts

John R. Lott and Maxim Lott/Fox News

If the D.C. ban is accepted by the court, it is hard to believe that any gun regulation will ever be struck down. If the court strikes it down, where the courts draw the line on what laws are considered "reasonable" regulations will take years to sort out.

The Department of Justice and D.C. politicians can talk all they want about how necessary handgun bans are to ensure public safety and the "reasonableness" of the restrictions. But hopefully the Supreme Court will see past that. At some point, hard facts must matter. This is one point where public safety and individual rights coincide.

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Joel likes: Gun shy?

Benjamin Wittes/The New Republic

Quite reluctantly, being generally a supporter of gun control, I have come to believe in the individual rights view of the provision. Though one can still make a respectable historical and textual argument for the collective rights view of the amendment, the weight of the argument is on the individualistic side. The words "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed" have to mean something. For the justices to pretend otherwise would cast doubts on our society's fidelity to the Constitution itself.

At the same time, a view of the amendment that cripples modern governments from keeping terribly dangerous weapons out of big cities and out of the hands of dangerous people would be a disaster in practical terms. Whatever conception the founders may have had of the amendment, they didn't have to think about situations like Virginia Tech, and they did not have inner-city gun crime. All of this argues against a simple translation of Second Amendment values from the founding era to our own. It's a reality that is implicitly recognized in the Bush administration's brief.

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