High court's gun ruling means more legal fights ahead, Washington advocates agree

The U.S. Supreme Court's landmark ruling Thursday establishing a citizen's right to keep a gun at home prompted quick responses from Washington state advocates on both sides of the debate.

And it turns out they agree on one thing: many, many more court battles are ahead.

Now the litigation here — as elsewhere in the country — is likely to shift to more nuanced, but still critical, questions:

Can guns be banned on public property, as Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently ordered? Can you openly carry a pistol on a downtown Seattle street? Is the state's ban on sawed-off shotguns and other types of guns constitutional?

The 5-4 ruling, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, clipped the extreme ends off the debate. An outright ban on handguns was found to be unconstitutional, but Scalia's opinion defended government's authority to enact "reasonable restrictions" on gun possession.

The definition of "reasonable" is likely to fuel further argument, but it was a joyful day for gun-rights advocates such as Dave Workman, of Bellevue, who is the senior editor of the magazine Gun Week.

"This is probably the biggest story I'm going to write in my lifetime," he said. "This is not just a win for gun-rights guys. This is a win for all civil rights."

Still, in Washington the immediate effects of the ruling are limited. With an estimated million gun owners in the state, many state laws are already rooted in a Western, libertarian philosophy about firearms.

And the state constitution has a more forceful protection of the right for "the individual citizen to bear arms in defense of himself" than the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. The state Attorney General's Office on Thursday said a review of existing laws found none that appears to be in conflict with the high court's ruling.

But the ruling has emboldened gun-rights advocates' protests of a pending ban on handguns in city of Seattle buildings, parks and community centers. Nickels signed an executive order last month; the ban is likely to be posted in July, the mayor said.

"The central part of the court's decision was that a jurisdiction cannot totally ban handguns, but they recognize there is a need for common-sense gun laws," Nickels said.

"I think, in fact, it clarifies the fact that we do have ability to enact reasonable restrictions on guns in public property."

The mayor may be right, said Andrew Siegel, a professor of constitutional law at Seattle University. But the Supreme Court did not set a legal test to define "reasonable."

"If you think about it in terms of the First Amendment, we've had 100 years of complicated tests for [defining] free speech," Siegel said. " We're going to start that process with the Second Amendment."

Among the issues likely to be tested here is the "open carry" of firearms. A gun owner must get a concealed-weapons permit — 235,000 Washingtonians have one — and pass a background check to hide a gun inside clothing. It is legal to wear firearms openly in Washington. But a state law outlaws showing a weapon in a way that "warrants alarm" in others.

Buoyed by the high-court ruling, gun-rights groups are likely to test that law in the Legislature, Workman said.

"This is the top half of the first inning," he said. "Now we're going to follow and see where the gun-rights battle really goes."

Meanwhile, Kristen Comer, executive director of the gun-control group Washington Ceasefire, said the ruling was no surprise. But her group thinks it could actually help their efforts by ensuring the right to private ownership of guns.

Now gun-rights groups can't argue that reasonable gun control will lead to a "slippery slope" to total gun bans, she said.

"Gun restrictions are not a backdoor way to ban all guns in society," she said.

"And that is never what we intended. But when we advocate for policy restrictions, that's where we're accused of heading. That argument is now gone."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com