One of scores of types of lockboxes available for storing handguns.
Over the objections of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas, the Supreme Court Monday declined to hear an appeal from six gun owners and the National Rifle Association seeking a loosening of gun laws in San Francisco. Lower courts have upheld the laws.
The case—Jackson v. City of San Francisco—has been working its way through the courts since 2009. The laws passed in 2007.
One ordinance being challenged mandates that while at home San Francisco gun owners must either carry their gun on their person, keep it in a lockbox or disable it with a trigger-lock. The other ordinance prohibits the sale of hollow-point and similar bullets, which expand when they hit their target.
Last year, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in a 35-page decision that the San Francisco laws are "not a substantial burden on the Second Amendment right itself because it did not prevent an individual from possessing a firearm in the home.”
The Jackson case was brought because, in the view of the plaintiffs, the laws contradicted the Supreme Court's 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller. The court decided in that case that the Second Amendment gave citizens the right to keep a firearm for self-defense in the home. The D.C. law barred the registration of handguns and required that firearms kept at home must be kept unloaded and either disassembled or locked up. Justice Scalia, who wrote the majority 5-4 decision overturning the law, said that to meet the spirit of the Second Amendment, a gun in the home should be "operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”
The ruling was extended beyond D.C. to the whole country in McDonald v. City of Chicago.
Lawyers for the six San Franciscans who brought suit argued that the lower court decisions in Jackson were “perhaps the most direct repudiation of this court’s holding in Heller since the decision was handed down.”
Lyle Denniston at the SCOTUSBlog noted that Justices Scalia and Thomas objected to the Supreme Court's decision not to take up the Jackson case:
The rulings upholding the San Francisco ordinance are “in serious tension with Heller,” the dissenters argued. The Court should have granted review, they contended, “to reiterate that courts may not engage in ... judicial assessment as to the severity of the burden imposed on core Second Amendment rights.”
Declining to review the case presumably means that any cities or other jurisdictions that want to restrict handguns and ammunition similarly to how San Francisco has done now have a free hand. It's one of those rare losses for the National Rifle Association.