Gun-control advocates have long been making these sorts of arguments outside the legal sphere, at town halls and televised rallies.
It recounts the narratives of Aalayah Eastmond, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas student who “saw blood pooling on the floor” and a fellow student “slumped against the wall, dead” Jackson Mittleman, a sixth grader who comforted the siblings of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting as they contemplated the loss of their 6-year-old brother and Brooke Harrison, another Stoneman Douglas student, who saw “a lifelong friend” shot at his desk and was forced to “watch.
The brief asks the Court to confront the consequences of the gun lobby’s myopic approach, and it does so by bringing in the voices of young people whose lives have been upended by gun violence. The March for Our Lives brief is a reminder to the Court that it cannot ignore the world it creates through its interpretation of the Second Amendment. We call our foundational legal text a Constitution because it constitutes our legal and political reality. Read: A rare gun-control proposal that could unite Congress The point is that the right to bear arms is not the only constitutional commitment implicated in the guns debate, and the Court ought to consider those other commitments as worth balancing with the right to bear arms, not as inherently subordinate to it. These include a collective understanding of self-defense, as well as constitutional guarantees such as the right to public assembly and interests such as access to public education. The March for Our Lives brief marks the beginning of a long-needed effort to offer a pro-gun-control constitutional narrative, one that calls attention to the constitutional rights and goods vindicated by gun regulation. The Second Amendment, they say, protects an individual’s right to gun ownership, a right rooted in deeply held notions of self-defense and individual reliance.įor decades, gun-control advocates have left this narrative partially unanswered, offering depressing statistics but no compelling constitutional principle. The stakes are high: The case offers the Court’s conservative wing a vehicle to further solidify legal barriers to firearm regulation, a decades-long project that has thus far been quite successful-in part due to the appeal of a unified constitutional narrative that pro-gun voices have invoked across both the legal and the political spheres. At issue is whether a New York City regulation that prevents licensed gun owners from transporting their firearms to second homes or gun ranges outside the city runs afoul of the Second Amendment. The Supreme Court confirmed earlier this month that it would hear the case later this term, its first gun-rights case in nearly a decade. Its brief “presents the voices and stories of young people from Parkland, Florida, to South Central Los Angeles who have been affected directly and indirectly by gun violence.” Yet March for Our Lives chose to upend this norm in its amicus brief-a legal filing written by an interested outside party-in the upcoming Supreme Court case New York State Rifle & Pistol Association Inc.
Readers are far more likely to encounter austere Latin legalisms than gripping personal narratives. Supreme Court briefs are not known for their colorful writing.