Supreme Court
Scalia: ‘You Can’t Bear a Tank’
Posted Oct 3, 2008, 08:23 am CST
By Edward A. Adams
Fielding questions after a lecture at Harvard Law School on Wednesday, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia outlined the limits of the court’s decision on the right to bear arms earlier this year in District of Columbia v. Heller (PDF).
An audience member suggested that the ruling meant one could hypothetically own large pieces of weaponry, the Harvard Crimson reports.
“Bearing arms—you can’t bear a tank,” Scalia replied. “You can’t bear a cannon or a mortar of the sort in use in 1781, so it didn’t even the playing field between the citizens and the standing army,” he said.
The October issue of the ABA Journal reports the Heller decision has given rise to a series of suits against municipalities over their handgun bans. The suits seek to determine whether gun proponents can enforce the newly minted individual right through the doctrine of incorporation, which the high court uses to apply the Bill of Rights to state and local governments.
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