The Supreme court will not hear a National Rifle Association challenge to a San Francisco law requiring that handgun owners storing their weapons at home either put them in a lockbox, disable them with a trigger lock, or have them on their person.
As Reuters reports, the nation's highest court will let stand a federal appeals court decision from 2014 that called the regulation, issued in 2007, a reasonable measure to promote gun safety while preserving constitutional rights.
Though it's hard to see how a requirement that gun owners keep their firearm somewhere safe or in a holster on their body could be construed as a dangerous foreclosure of the Second Amendment, the appeal was nonetheless brought by six San Francisco residents and groups including the gun advocacy stalwart.
The city of San Francisco successfully argued in favor of the legality of the 2007 regulation according to Bloomberg, by citing its compliance with the 2008 District of Columbia case in which the court held that the Second Amendment guaranteed an individual right to bear arms. That ruling was extended to all states in 2010.
“San Francisco’s ordinance allows citizens to carry loaded and unlocked handguns on their person at any time, including in a holster,” the city wrote, quoting from the 2008 ruling that “It also allows citizens to store loaded handguns within an easily opened lockbox rather than ‘disassembled or bound by a trigger lock at all times.’”
Two of the court's deeply conservative Justices, Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, said they would have heard the appeal. “Despite the clarity with which we described the Second Amendment’s core protection for the right of self-defense, lower courts, including the ones here, have failed to protect it,” Thomas wrote for the duo.