From Ed Whelan at NRO Bench Memos:
Rickey I. Kanter pleaded guilty to one count of federal mail fraud for falsely representing that his company’s therapeutic shoe inserts were Medicare-approved and for billing Medicare on that basis. Both federal law and Wisconsin law bar a convicted felon from possessing a firearm.
On Friday, a Seventh Circuit panel ruled (in Kanter v. Barr) that the application of those federal and Wisconsin bars to Kanter did not violate his Second Amendment rights. In an impressive dissent (beginning here), Judge Amy Coney Barrett explained why she disagreed. From her opening paragraphs (emphasis in original):
History is consistent with common sense: it demonstrates that legislatures have the power to prohibit dangerous people from possessing guns. But that power extends only to people who are dangerous. Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons. Nor have the parties introduced any evidence that founding-era legislatures imposed virtue-based restrictions on the right; such restrictions applied to civic rights like voting and jury service, not to individual rights like the right to possess a gun. In 1791—and for well more than a century afterward— legislatures disqualified categories of people from the right to bear arms only when they judged that doing so was necessary to protect the public safety. …
Commentators have puzzled over Justice Scalia's paragraph in District of Columbia v. Heller in which he seemed to approve of various limitations on gun possession, including possession by felons, without explaining how to determine which limitations are constitutional. I think, consistent with his approach to the First Amendment, this is clearly how he would have done it — by asking what limitations were commonly imposed in 1791 and thereafter. (See my discussion in this article).
RELATED: Recently published in the Federalist Society Review (Vol. 20), Joseph Greenlee: Concealed Carry and the Right to Bear Arms. It concludes:
… [I]s it constitutional for a state to prohibit open carry while broadly allowing concealed carry—as some states do today? The “original meaning” sources relied on by the Heller Court, the right-to-carry cases extolled by the Heller Court, and post-Heller decisions from lower courts indicate that the right to bear arms is not infringed as long as law-abiding citizens are able to publicly bear arms either openly or concealed.
(Thanks to Will Foster for the pointer).
Posted at 6:05 AM