Right to bear arms at heart of high court case

By James Vicini - Analysis

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the first time in 70 years, the U.S. Supreme Court will take on the question of whether individual Americans have the right to keep and bear arms or whether it a collective right of the people for service in a state militia.

That question is at the heart of a long, impassioned debate about how much power the government has to keep people from owning guns and it could soon be decided by the U.S. Supreme Court in a case about one of the nation's strictest gun control laws.

Set for arguments on March 18 and with a decision expected by late June, the nation's highest court could resolve once and for all the much-disputed meaning of the Second Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Written 219 years ago, the amendment 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."

Few constitutional law issues have triggered more scholarly debate and historical research on whether the Constitution's authors intended to guarantee an individual right or a collective right tied to service in a state-regulated militia, like today's National Guard.

The arguments follow a series of mass shootings in the past year -- multiple killings on at least three college campuses, two shopping centers and one Missouri town meeting. Gun deaths average 80 a day in the United States, 34 of them homicides, according to Centers for Disease Control data, and yet the gun issue has barely registered in the U.S. presidential campaign.

If the court finds it is an individual right, gun control advocates fear it could place in jeopardy not only the ban on private handgun ownership in the U.S. capital at issue in the case, but also other laws around the country regulating and restricting private possession of firearms.

The Supreme Court's last review of the Second Amendment came in a five-page discussion in an opinion issued nearly 70 years ago that failed to definitively resolve the constitutional issue.