Supreme Court Rejects Federal School Gun Ban

A sharply divided Supreme Court on Wednesday struck down a 1990 federal law that outlaws possession of a gun within 1,000 feet of a school.

In a ruling with broad implications for constitutional law and with potentially far-reaching impact on domestic social policy, the high court ruled that the Gun-Free School Zones Act is an unconstitutional infringement on states’ rights to regulate purely local activity.

The 5-4 majority, led by Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, asserted that Congress exceeded its authority by defining school safety as “economic activity” governed by the Constitution’s commerce clause and therefore subject to federal intervention.

The decision marks a turn from 60 years of court precedent that has put greater and greater power in the hands of Congress--power that some argue should have remained in the hands of the states. Since the New Deal era of the 1930s, the high court has allowed Congress to regulate virtually every aspect of American life because it was said to affect interstate commerce.

Wednesday’s decision comes against a backdrop of an intense partisan debate in Washington over federal versus states’ rights. The conservative majority on the court appeared to come down on the side of congressional Republicans who seek to return a vast array of powers to the states.

A narrow majority of the court is saying, in effect, “enough already” to decades of what they see as federal usurpation of state authority, said constitutional scholar Jesse H. Choper at the UC’ Berkeley’s Boalt Hall law school.

Rehnquist, writing for the majority in the case (United States v. Lopez, 93-1260), said “possession of a gun in a local school zone is in no sense an economic activity that might, through repetition elsewhere, have . . . a substantial effect on interstate commerce.”

Upholding the 1990 gun law, Rehnquist argued, would “obliterate” all distinctions between what is local and what is national and allow federal authorities to meddle in all aspects of private life, including marriage and school curricula.

The justices in the majority noted that more than 40 states already limit possession of weapons on school grounds and that those local statutes remain perfectly valid.

The minority, led by first-year Justice Stephen G. Breyer, assailed the “extraordinary decision” of the court as a threat both to the nation’s schoolchildren and to its economic competitiveness.

Breyer noted in his lengthy dissent that 20% of urban high school students have been threatened with guns and that 4% of American high school students carry guns to school at least occasionally.

“Gun-related violence in and around schools is a commercial, as well as a human problem,” Breyer wrote, saying that students in violent schools learn poorly, perform badly in the work force and cause U.S. economic competitiveness to suffer. “Education, although far more than a matter of economics, has long been inextricably intertwined with the nation’s economy,” Breyer said.

Joining Rehnquist’s opinion were Justices Anthony M. Kennedy, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Dissenting along with Breyer were Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Herbert Kohl (D-Wis.) said he was “astonished” by the high court action and vowed to reintroduce the guns-in-school bill in a form that will survive judicial scrutiny.

“I’m very disappointed that the Supreme Court has said that Congress cannot protect our children from guns,” Kohl said on the Senate floor. “This decision is a piece of judicial activism that ignores children’s safety.”

The court indicated that it might accept a federal guns-in-school law if the legislation made explicit the connection between school safety and national economic goals.

Sixty-five students and six school employees were shot and killed in U.S. schools during the five years before the law was enacted, according to the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence.

Some scholars called the high court’s decision startling in that it appeared to halt the 60-year trend toward a liberal interpretation of what the Constitution says about congressional power under the commerce clause. But they differed on the breadth of the ruling’s effect.

“This is a major decision, doctrinally an important case that’s going to be big in the casebooks,” Choper said. “It’s quite an astounding decision. It’s one of the very few times in 60 years that the Supreme Court has held a congressional action unconstitutional on the ground that it violated states’ rights.”

But Steven H. Shiffrin, a professor at Cornell University Law School, said this single case would not halt the accumulation of federal power, no matter how much the conservative majority of the court might like it to.

“I think that there might be some other cases in which the court will declare some law unconstitutional because it cannot be justified under the commerce clause,” Shiffrin said. “But I don’t see a sweeping rollback of legislation all the way back to 1937.”

The Gun Owners of America and the libertarian Cato Institute cheered the court’s decision, the former because it strikes down limits on gun possession and the latter because it narrows Congress’ regulatory powers.

The National Education Assn. condemned the ruling for taking away a tool to make schools safer.

The ruling came in a 1992 incident. Alfonso Lopez Jr., then a senior at Edison High School in San Antonio, came to school carrying a .38-caliber handgun and five bullets.

He was arrested and charged under Texas law with firearm possession on school property. The next day, the state charges were dropped and he was rearrested under the federal Gun-Free School Zones Act.

He challenged his conviction on grounds that the federal statute exceeded Congress’ authority under the commerce clause. The U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals agreed and overturned his conviction. The Supreme Court agreed.

Also Wednesday, the high court ruled that states may regulate hospital costs by requiring patients covered by employee benefit plans to pay higher rates than those with other types of health coverage (New York State Conference of Blue Cross & Blue Shield Plans vs. The Travelers, 93-1408, 93-1414 and 93-1415).

The unanimous decision reinstated parts of New York’s hospital-reimbursement system, saying that it is not preempted by federal law. About half the states have similar provisions, New York officials had told the high court.