7th Circuit Court of Appeals Rules That U.S. Government and States Can Require Mandatory Gun Registration Under Second Amendment!

I interpret the Constitution (particularly the Bill of Rights) in a strict sense. Therefore, if the Constitution says that a certain right cannot be infringed, then I take that as an almost absolute! However, the federal government takes a position and wants to convert our 2nd Amendment right into a privilege. In my opinion, gun registration will ultimately lead to gun confiscation. If the government knows who owns the guns, then it knows who to target.

Last year, many 2nd Amendment supporters claimed victory in the Heller D.C. gun ban case where the Supreme Court ruled that the 2nd Amendment confers to an individual the right to firearms. The case essentially eliminated the extremes on each side of the gun issue. While there cannot be a total firearms ban, a government can regulate firearms. Further, the Heller ruling was only applicable to federal zones such as the District of Columbia and the Court did not rule whether the 2nd Amendment is applicable to the States.

Now it appears that this ruling has come home to roost, because the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago (of course!) ruled last week that federal, state or local government can require mandatory firearms registration under the Second Amendment.

The case arose out of the Chicago-area town of Cicero's mandatory registration requirement for firearms. A local man named John Justice was raided by the Cicero police on suspicion of violating business ordinances including improper storage of chemicals; the police discovered six unregistered handguns during the raid.

Justice...argued in a civil lawsuit that the local ordinance violated the Second Amendment.

In a 3-0 opinion published last Friday, the judges said that this was a different situation from the District of Columbia v. Heller case, which led the Supreme Court to strike down D.C.'s law effectively prohibiting the ownership of handguns.

"There is a critical distinction between the D.C. ordinance struck down in Heller and the Cicero ordinance," the court said in an opinion written by Judge Diane Wood, a Clinton appointee. "Cicero has not prohibited gun possession in the town. Instead, it has merely regulated gun possession under Section 62-260 of its ordinance."

If the court had merely written that the Second Amendment doesn't apply to the states (a concept called incorporation), this would not have been especially newsworthy. After all, a different three-judge panel from the 7th Circuit already has rejected the incorporation argument.

What's unusual -- and makes this case remarkable -- is that Wood went out of her way to say that even if the Second Amendment does apply to states, mandatory gun registration would be perfectly constitutional. "The town does prohibit the registration of some weapons, but there is no suggestion in the complaint or the record that Justice's guns fall within the group that may not be registered," she wrote. "Nor does Heller purport to invalidate any and every regulation on gun use."

The other judges on the panel were William Bauer, a Ford appointee, and John Tinder, a George W. Bush appointee.

Read literally, the Seventh Circuit's decision means that the U.S. Congress could enact a mandatory registration requirement tomorrow -- a law saying that you must report your handguns, rifles, and shotguns to the FBI and ATF or go to prison -- and at least one federal circuit would uphold it as constitutional...

Source: CBS News