No time to celebrate guns

Pro-gun activists may have planned to boldly celebrate the fifth anniversary of Richard Heller’s successful gun rights case. However, a murder spree in Santa Monica and George Zimmerman’s murder trial over-shadowed those plans.

Jury selection began last week on the second-degree-murder trial of 29-year-old George Zimmerman, charged in the gun death of 17-year-old Trayvon Martin. While Americans were bracing for racial fallout from Zimmerman’s trial, five lives were taken in Santa Monica, California.

After indiscriminately shooting at cars, a public bus and pedestrians, gunman John Zawahri, 23, wearing a load-bearing vest and armed with an AR-15 assault rifle, was shot and killed by police. High-powered weapons and over 1,300 rounds of ammunition were found in his car. Before leaving home, Zawahri, who allegedly suffered from mental illness, first shot his father and his own brother and then set fire to their family home.

Earlier this year, the NRA attacked Congress’ proposed background checks, restrictions on gun ownership by the mentally ill, assault weapons and limits on gun magazine rounds, as illegal encroachments on Second Amendment rights. Congress had hoped America’s shock over the massacre at Newtown’s Sandy Hook Elementary School would propel federal gun control legislation.  

However, not even this massacre was enough to stop the NRA’s powerful campaign to block passage of Congress’ proposed gun control. Sixteen States further loosened their gun laws, including now allowing guns on college campuses and arming public school personnel. Wyoming judges may now carry guns into their courtrooms. But New York State passed the nation’s most rigid gun control laws in March. Connecticut, Delaware, Maryland and Colorado have also made it more difficult to own a gun.

At the center of the controversy is the Heller decision. Richard Heller was a special officer with the District of Columbia who became frustrated when he could carry a gun in federal office buildings, but D.C. law prohibited possessing a gun at home.

In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of Heller’s personal gun ownership. It was the first U.S. Supreme Court ruling in decades involving the Second Amendment. There also was an associated Chicago gun case. In 2010, Otis McDonald and residents from Chicago’s South Side challenged that city’s restrictive gun laws. Pro-gun groups succeeded in winning that case.

For now, Heller-related anniversary events are cautiously subdued. Although emboldened by their defeat of proposed Federal gun restrictions, with Zawahri’s Santa Monica massacre, and renewed focus on George Zimmerman’s gun trial, pro-gun activists may judge this not to be the best time to celebrate a gun victory. 

Browne-Marshall is a legal correspondent covering the U.S. Supreme Court and an associate professor of Constitutional Law at John Jay College.