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Gun storage law defended in state's highest court

E-mail|Link|Comments () November 5, 2009 07:07 PM

By Martin Finucane, Globe Staff

The Middlesex district attorney's office argued today in the state's highest court that a state law that requires guns to be stored in locked containers or outfitted with trigger locks is valid. But the attorney for a Billerica man charged with keeping a gun in an unlocked carrying case said the law should be negated by a recent decision of the US Supreme Court.

Chief Justice Marshall

While the Supreme Court struck down a tough handgun ban last year in the District of Columbia, the court "went out of its way to make clear that the right to bear arms, like all rights, is not unlimited. It can be curtailed by regulatory measures," said Assistant District Attorney Loretta M. Lillios.

"They went out of their way to say that the … decision was not invalidating laws that were enacted to prevent accidents and that such regulations were presumptively lawful," Lillios told the state Supreme Judicial Court in oral arguments.

The SJC is being asked to rule in a case in which Richard Runyan was charged in April 2008 with improper gun storage. A Lowell District Court judge threw out the charge, citing the June 2008 Supreme Court ruling in a case called District of Columbia v. Heller. Prosecutors appealed.

Attorney Brenden J. McMahon, representing Runyan, said the Supreme Court ruling held not only that the District's "wholesale ban on guns is unconstitutional and violates the Second Amendment," but that provisions requiring trigger locks were invalid.

"I submit to you that Heller stands for the proposition… that the state does not have a right to regulate to this extent the possession of unloaded firearms -- or even loaded firearms, perhaps -- in the home for lawful purposes such as self-defense," said attorney Edward F. George Jr., who represented the Gun Owners' Action League and Second Amendment Foundation Inc., which filed a friend of the court brief.

A long list of organizations, including the state attorney general's office, state health officials, the state's other district attorneys, groups representing police officers and chiefs, and activists against gun violence, also weighed in as friends of the court, arguing for the law.

Overshadowing the arguments over the Massachusetts law is a decision expected by June by the Supreme Court, which is expected to determine whether the Second Amendment, which famously gives the people the "right to keep and bear arms" as part of a "well regulated militia," applies to the states.

The amendments in the Bill of Rights originally were only meant as restrictions on federal power, but over the years, on a case-by-case basis, the court has held that most of the amendments applied to the states as well. One notable exception: the Second Amendment, said Suffolk University constitutional law professor Gerard Clark.

The court did not say in its ruling in the Heller case, which took place in the District of Columbia (a federal enclave not a state), whether the Second Amendment should be applied to the states.

The SJC judges peppered the attorneys with a number of questions, with several centering on whether the Massachusetts law was as severe as the District of Columbia ban and would make impossible for a citizen to use a gun for self-defense within the home.

Chief Justice Margaret Marshall said a number of gun law challenges, including more than one case being argued today, and asked if the state court should suspend judgment on them until the Supreme Court rules, or go ahead and assume the Supreme Court will apply the Second Amendment to the states.

Lillios argued that even if the Supreme Court decides that the Second Amendment does apply to the states, the law will withstand scrutiny.

"I would urge the court to find this ordinance would pass muster even under the Second Amendment," she told the SJC.