Mercury News | Court: Citizens have no right to own guns

A federal appeals court in San Francisco on Thursday found that individual citizens do not have a constitutional right to own a firearm, cutting to the core of the modern debate over gun control and repudiating the gun lobby's most cherished legal argument.

The opinion is starkly at odds with a federal appeals court ruling in New Orleans last year that the 211-year-old amendment does give individuals the right to bear arms. For that reason, it could give the U.S. Supreme Court its first opportunity in decades to clarify what has long been an unsettled question in constitutional law.

In upholding California's most recent assault weapons ban, the appeals court reached back into history to conclude that the founding fathers crafted the Second Amendment solely to enable state militias to protect themselves if the federal government grew too powerful.

``The historical record makes it equally plain that the amendment was not adopted in order to afford rights to individuals with respect to private gun ownership,'' Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for a three-judge panel.

This will be a hot one.