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WASHINGTON - AMERICANS have a right to own guns, the Supreme Court has ruled for the first time in the country's history - resolving one of the Constitution's oldest disputes and reviving the debate over gun rights, crime and violence.
In the landmark 5-4 ruling on the last day of the court's 2007-08 term, Justice Antonin Scalia said the Constitution's Second Amendment guarantees 'the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defence of hearth and home'.
The court struck down a Washington ordinance that barred home owners from keeping handguns.
The court said 'the right of the people to keep and bear arms' is not limited to state militias, as some historians have argued. Rather, it protects 'the inherent right of self-defence', Justice Scalia said.
For decades, the meaning of the Second Amendment has been at the heart of a political and legal debate over gun control - whether it guarantees the right to bear arms to individuals or to citizens in a militia.
Written more than 200 years ago, it says: 'A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.'
The four dissenting judges said the majority had unwisely opened the door to legal attacks on popular and effective gun-control measures.
'I fear that the district's policy choice may be just the first of an unknown number of dominoes to be knocked off the table,' Justice John Paul Stevens said.
Justice Scalia stressed that the decision, while historic, was narrow and limited.
'Nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings,' he said.
The majority opinion also said that bans on carrying concealed or dangerous and unusual weapons, such as machine guns, were not in doubt.
The ruling won praise from President George W. Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain.
Mr Wayne LaPierre of the National Rifle Association lobby group said: 'This is a great moment in American history.'
But the ruling drew fire from gun-control groups, which warned of new legal attacks on existing gun laws, and some Democrats in Congress such as Senator Dianne Feinstein, who said the decision 'opens this nation to a dramatic lack of safety'.
REUTERS, LOS ANGELES TIMES
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