THE UNITED States supreme court has overturned a ban on handguns in Washington DC declaring that the American constitution guarantees an individual's right to bear arms.
In the first major ruling on gun rights in the court's history, a 5-4 majority said the second amendment to the constitution allows Americans to own guns for self-defence and hunting.
The ruling could doom similar gun bans in cities such as Chicago and San Francisco but the court made clear that guns can still be banned from sensitive areas such as schools, churches and government buildings and kept out of the hands of criminals.
In his majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia said some restrictions had to be permitted to combat gun crime, including some measures regulating handguns. "But the enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table. These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defence in the home," Mr Scalia said.
Washington banned handguns in 1976, in an attempt to reduce the violent crime that has plagued the US capital. The city also requires that all legally owned shotguns and rifles should be kept disassembled and unloaded unless they are in a business establishment.
The city's mayor, Adrian Fenty, who had defended the handgun ban, said he would introduce a plan to require residents of the nation's capital to register their handguns.
"More handguns in the District of Columbia will only lead to more handgun violence," the mayor said.
Gun rights campaigners welcomed yesterday's decision, which president George Bush endorsed as an affirmation of "the right of Americans to keep and bear arms".
Republican presidential candidate John McCain described the ruling as a victory for freedom but his Democratic rival, Barack Obama, issued a more cautious response. "Even though we have an individual right to bear arms, that right can be limited by sensible, reasonable gun laws," Mr Obama said.
Some 85 people have been murdered so far this year in Washington, which has struggled against violent crime for decades and was known during the 1990s as the murder capital of the US. About 10,000 people are killed in gun crimes in the US every year, some 75 per cent of them shot with handguns.
In his dissenting opinion yesterday, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote: "In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the second amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas."