By my count, 11 state constitutions have not been interpreted as clearly protecting an individual right to bear arms:
California, Iowa, Maryland, Minnesota, New Jersey, and New York lack such a state constitutional provision altogether. The Kansas and Massachusetts provisions have been interpreted as collective. The Hawaii, South Carolina, and Virginia provisions are close to the Second Amendment, and have not been clearly interpreted as individual or collective. A Hawaii decision from the 1990s expressly left the issue unresolved; a Virginia attorney general's opinion from 1993 endorses the collective rights view, but there's no dispositive Virginia (or South Carolina) caselaw on the subject. (In my view, it makes little sense for a right to bear arms in a state constitution to be treated as something other than a right of state citizens or residents, but I'm just noting here that the courts haven't spoken to this.) My sense is that at least in Iowa, Kansas, lSouth Carolina, Virginia, and likely Minnesota, enacting or clarifying the right to bear arms provision would be pretty popular; and of course such amendments have been enacted in the past several decades, most recently in Wisconsin in 1998 (by a 74-26 margin). Have there been attempts to do the same in these states? Is there a sense that people just aren't going to be enthusiastic to invest time and money in this, because the right to bear arms isn't much in jeopardy in those states? My sense is that it's better to act now, when the right is relatively popular in the jurisdiction, than to wait until it's threatened; and the example of Wisconsin and some other states suggests that such action is often possible even without a "news hook." But I might well be mistaken on the politics of the matter; I'd love to hear what others know about the subject. Many thanks, Eugene _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
