Heller . . . Britt . . . What's Next for Gun Laws?

We've seen several significant cases concerning gun laws in the past few years. The two biggest, of course, are District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. ___ (2008), in which the United States Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia's ban on handgun possession as inconsistent with the Second Amendment, and Britt v. North Carolina, discussed in this prior post, in which the North Carolina Supreme Court ruled, under the state constitution's analogue to the Second Amendment, that a particular convicted felon, whose single, non-violent conviction was many years in the past, could not be prohibited from possessing a gun. More changes may be afoot in this area, and lawyers on both sides should be aware of the legal landscape. For starters, the United States Supreme Court will hear, this Term, McDonald v. Chicago, a case that asks whether the Second Amendment applies to the states, either through selective incorporation under the Fourteenth Amendment's due process guarantee or (more radically) because selective incorporation is wrong and all of the bill of rights apply to the states. This question wasn't relevant in Heller, because the District of Columbia is a federal jurisdiction, but it's a critical question because if the Second Amendment only applies to the federal government, the practical importance of Heller will be quite limited. A brief discussion of McDonald is here; a gun rights group's website about the case, with links to some briefs, is here. I don't think that a date has been set yet for the [...]