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Second Amendment victory

June 27, 2008 | By Nathaniel Ward

In a landmark decision released Thursday, the Supreme Court upheld the individual right to bear arms by striking down the District of Columbia’s onerous prohibition on handguns and its strict controls on long guns.

“The U.S. Supreme Court held that the right to keep and bear arms, recognized in the Second Amendment, is an individual right of all Americans unconnected with service in a militia,” explains Todd Gaziano, director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Legal and Judicial Studies.

“Americans may use arms like handguns for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.”

Writing on Human Events online, Heritage legal scholar Andrew Grossman says Justice Scalia’s majority opinion in the case, District of Columbia v. Heller, “decimates the gun control crowd’s contention that the Second Amendment guarantees only a collective right, having to do with states’ militias, making it all but irrelevant in the modern age.”

» Read the decision in PDF format.

Heritage has been an effective advocate for a common-sense understanding of the Second Amendment. When Heller came before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Heritage legal scholars helped the winning side prepare its arguments.

American identity

Most eighth-graders who took the National Assessment of Educational Progress Civics Test in 2006 couldn’t explain the purpose of the Declaration of Independence. Which means those middle-schoolers didn’t understand why, as Americans, we celebrate Independence Day every July 4.

The good news, though, includes a report from the Bradley Project on America’s National Identity that finds a longing among Americans for a stronger sense of national identity, history and purpose.

A la Chart on first principles.

» See the full-size chart

Other Heritage work of note

  • Health Care. As lawmakers debate how best to reform America’s health care system, Heritage’s experts continue to argue for a system based on free enterprise and not Washington. “The best approach to achieve our goals is through a ‘bottom-up evolution’ not a ‘top-down revolution,’” Heritage’s Stuart Butler told the Senate Finance Committee last week. Butler made the case for state-based reforms that empower individuals to own their own health insurance—without government-sponsored health plans.
  • Entrepreneurship. The 2003 tax cuts allowed economic growth to increase by rewarding hard work and investment, Heritage economist J.D. Foster writes. “Combined with an aggressive monetary policy, tax relief helped to restore robust economic growth following the Clinton reces­sion and subsequent shocks early in the decade. It pro­duced a more growth-oriented tax policy for the long term, helping the economy to weather current storms arising in the housing and capital markets. And it made important strides toward fundamental tax reform.” Congress should therefore block the largest tax increase in American history and make current tax rates permanent.
  • Protect America and Entrepreneurship. How much has the war in Iraq cost the nation? Popular analyses of the costs of the Iraq war put the long-term cost in the trillions of dollars—but such studies are based on faulty assumptions and contain certain key exaggerations, Heritage economist Bill Beach told members of the Senate Finance Committee last week. The assumptions on which these reports are based, Beach explains, “are increasingly unfounded. Some of the recent estimates violate the fundamental rules for comparative cost analysis. In addition, these estimates take a generally worst case view and fail to take into account important offsetting factors.”
  • American Leadership. America and its allies must push for “the elimination of North Korea’s nuclear weapons and programs,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said last week at The Heritage Foundation. Only when the communist country’s nuclear programs are fully dismantled can the United States rest easy, Rice told the audience in Heritage’s Allison Auditorium. “We are now reaching a point at which all sides have some very difficult choices to make.” —Tim Barnes
  • Energy and Environment. Heritage’s David Kreutzer explains why radical environmentalists are wrong on nuclear energy. “When considered properly, nuclear power is the only available technology that is adequate, affordable, reliable, safe, and environmentally clean. If the nation wants to limit CO2 emissions, then it must turn to nuclear power.”
  • Protect America. Congress should consider reforms to better pay those who volunteer to fight for their country. “While the U.S. government can never truly pay military personnel enough for their achievements and sacrifices,” Heritage’s Mackenzie Eaglen writes, “internal reforms can make it possible to pay an all-volunteer force more effectively.”

In other news

  • President Bush has removed North Korea from the list of countries that sponsor terrorism. He also lifted the trade sanctions against the communist country.
  • A Congressional committee has agreed to continue funding an important scholarship program in the District of Columbia that allows low-income children to attend private schools instead of failing city public schools. Liberals had threatened to scrap the program.
  • Updated economic data show the economy continued its slow but positive growth in the first quarter. The economy grew at a one percent rate between January and March, up from the 0.9 percent estimated earlier.
  • Climate scientist James Hansen argues that energy executives should face criminal penalties for spreading “disinformation” about global warming. Hansen joins a chorus of climate alarmists who believe it is a crime against humanity to contradict radical environmentalists on this issue.
  • Spanish lawmakers have proposed extending “rights” to apes. Reuters reports that “keeping apes for circuses, television commercials or filming will also be forbidden and breaking the new laws will become an offence under Spain's penal code.”

Coming up at Heritage

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Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation. Tim Barnes, an intern at The Heritage Foundation, contributed to this report.