Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away last week at the age of 79, was known for his colorful language in his written opinions and dissents from the bench. His most important majority opinion may have been in the 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled that banning handguns violates the Second Amendment. On the June 27, 2008 edition of "Washington Week," Linda Greenhouse, then-New York Times Supreme Court correspondent, and NBC News Justice Correspondent Pete Williams discussed Scalia's majority opinion and the ruling's meaning for the future.
Notice: Transcripts are machine and human generated and lightly edited for accuracy. They may contain errors.
MS. IFILL: Good evening. With another one of its trademark five-to-four decisions, the Supreme Court threatened to turn many of the nation's gun laws upside down this week, asserting that an individual's right to own a gun is protected by the Constitution. Justice Antonin Scalia writing for the five-to-four majority said this -- "Some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our nation where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct." The ruling overturned a gun ban here in the District of Columbia, but its effect is broad and deep, and the ruling did not end the debate.
So walk us through the court's decision, Linda, its ramifications, its future, all that stuff.
MS. GREENHOUSE: You're right. The court really opened up a whole new chapter in constitutional law, revised the well understood meaning of the Second Amendment, the meaning that had been debated a lot in recent years, but for many decades before that it had just been assumed, and the court's last pronouncement on the subject almost 70 years ago had been understood to stand for the proposition that the right to own a gun existed only in connection with militia or military service. So it's a new ball game. And there were certain qualifications in Justice Scalia's opinion. He said that restrictions of the sort that would have been acceptable to the framers of the Second Amendment, such as felons can't carry a gun, people who are insane can't carry a gun, you can't carry a concealed weapon, that those would be okay. But that leaves a lot of daylight where we're not quite sure what the next cases are going to bring.
MS. IFILL: So Pete, if it's been 70 years since the court last saw fit to take up a case of this kind, what was it about this case that brought us to this point?
MR. WILLIAMS: They had the right people to bring the case. One of the tricks here is that it's not entirely clear -- well, let me put it this way. Until a Supreme Court says it does apply to the states, it's assumed that it doesn't. So you had to have a case under federal jurisdiction, and that really leaves you with Washington, D.C. And a very well financed libertarian legal scholar said it's about time to find out what the Second Amendment means. And by the way, there have been earlier court rulings, but the court has never definitively solved this debate -- never said what the Second Amendment means, so that's why this is such a big deal. So he put together a sort of World War II movie -- bomber pilot, crew, a man, a woman, a gay person, and had a very diverse group of people. All of them but one fell out, a security guard who wanted to have a gun at home. He tried to get it registered. He couldn't, and that's what brought the case.
But the fascinating thing about this decision is the court says, you, District of Columbia, are depriving people from having the ideal gun for self-defense, a handgun, in the place where you need it the most to protect yourself, your family and your property -- in the home. And Justice Scalia even says rather colorfully in the opinion, I think you'd agree, that a handgun is so ideally suited for self- defense because you can hold it in one hand and dial the cops in the other.