The Liberty Papers

Today’s Washington Post has a profile of Robert Levy, the lead attorney in the case against the District of Columbia’s gun law:

Meet the lawyer who conceived the lawsuit that gutted the District’s tough gun-control statute this month. Meet the lawyer who recruited a group of strangers to sue the city and bankrolled their successful litigation out of his own pocket.

Meet Robert A. Levy, staunch defender of the Second Amendment, a wealthy former entrepreneur who said he has never owned a firearm and probably never will.

“I don’t actually want a gun,” Levy said by phone last week from his residence, a $1.7 million condominium in a Gulf Coast high-rise. “I mean, maybe I’d want a gun if I was living on Capitol Hill. Or in Anacostia somewhere. But I live in Naples, Florida, in a gated community. I don’t feel real threatened down here.”

He is 65, a District native who left the city 40 years ago for Montgomery County, a self-made millionaire who thinks the government interferes too much with people’s liberties. He was an investment analyst before he sold his company for a fortune and enrolled in law school at age 49. Now he’s a constitutional fellow with the libertarian Cato Institute in Washington, working in his luxury condo 1,000 miles away.

It was his idea, his project, his philosophical mission to mount a legal challenge to the city’s “draconian” gun restrictions, which are among the toughest in the nation. The statute offends his libertarian principles, Levy said. And it is entirely his money behind the lawsuit that led a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to strike down the statute this month, a ruling that stunned D.C. officials and gun-control advocates. The city said it will appeal the decision.

Although one of the Plaintiff’s in the case is Tom Palmer of the Cato Institute, the lawsuit was largely Levy’s idea, financed with his own money and done on his own time. Why ? Because the law violates his principles and he wanted to change it:

To Levy the libertarian, though, the effectiveness of the law — its success or failure in curbing crime — isn’t the core issue. What matters most to him is whether the statute unjustly infringes on personal liberties. He doesn’t dispute that “reasonable” gun controls are permissible under the Second Amendment. But the District’s law amounts to “an outright prohibition,” Levy said, and “that offends my constitutional sensibilities.”

So he opened his wallet and did something about it.

And the rest, as they say, is history, with the final chapter waiting to be written by the Justices of the United States Supreme Court.

As I read the article, I couldn’t help but think of Levy as a modern-day version of the Founding Fathers. He saw a law that he disagreed with, a law that didn’t even impact him since he didn’t live in the District and doesn’t like guns, and he did something to change it. It’s nice to know there are still people like that around.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has struck down the District of Columbia’s gun ban and done so while recognizing that the right to keep and bear arms guaranteed by the Second Amendment is an individual right:

Divided three-judge D.C. Circuit panel holds that the District of Columbia’s gun control laws violate individuals’ Second Amendment rights:

You can access today’s lengthy D.C. Circuit ruling at this link.

According to the majority opinion, “[T]he phrase ‘the right of the people,’ when read intratextually and in light of Supreme Court precedent, leads us to conclude that the right in question is individual.” The majority opinion sums up its holding on this point as follows:

To summarize, we conclude that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms. That right existed prior to the formation of the new government under the Constitution and was premised on the private use of arms for activities such as hunting and self-defense, the latter being understood as resistance to either private lawlessness or the depredations of a tyrannical government (or a threat from abroad). In addition, the right to keep and bear arms had the important and salutary civic purpose of helping to preserve the citizen militia. The civic purpose was also a political expedient for the Federalists in the First Congress as it served, in part, to placate their Antifederalist opponents. The individual right facilitated militia service by ensuring that citizens would not be barred from keeping the arms they would need when called forth for militia duty. Despite the importance of the Second Amendment’s civic purpose, however, the activities it protects are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual’s enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or her continued or intermittent enrollment in the militia.

The importance of this opinion cannot be understated. Gun control advocates have consistently attempted to argue that the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms was a “collective” right that applied, for example, to the right of individual states to form militas and control state National Guard units. This argument, of course, is completely inconsistent with the Founders view of the individual right to keep and bear arms, which is why this Court of Appeals decision is, as Jason Pye put it, very good news.

It looks like my fellow contributor Chris and I were thinking along the same lines at about the same time.