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The call Oscar Wilson Jr. got was to tell him his daughter, Talish Ford, had been gunned down in a D.C. Nightclub. This happened last year. She was just 17 years old.
Now her father worries what will happen if the Supreme Court throws out D.C.'s handgun ban.
"If it was that easy for him to get his hands on a gun without the gun ban being lifted, what happens once they life the gun ban," says Wilson. "Nobody wants to walk in my shoes, they don't want that phone call."
The Supreme Court will hear arguments tomorrow for the first time in 70 years considering a gun case dealing with the Second Amendment.
The issue is whether or not the Second Amendment covers an individual's right to keep and bear arms or does it only protect a state's right to have a well regulated militia.
"There are enough handguns on our streets. One could imagine what would happen if there were more guns," says Atlantic City's former mayor, Bob Levy. "All we want to do is level the playing field, the people who don't have guns are the ones who want to defend themselves in their own homes."
Some argue that the 32 year old ban hasn't worked. In fact, violent crime in D.C. went up and they point to one Georgia town that requires residents to own a gun. Crime plummeted there.
"A lot of people seem to think that more firearms would lead to more gun crimes, but in our experience it has been the opposite," says Lieutenant Craig Graydon of the Kennesaw Police Department.
Talisha's father just hopes other parents don't have to experience the loss he feels everyday. "I don't want nobody else to go through this," says Wilson.
Robert Levy has never owned a handgun and has no burning desire to own one now. He hasn't been a Washington resident since he was a teen in the 1950s.
But for six years, the wealthy attorney has carefully plotted a legal challenge to Washington's strict ban on handgun ownership, a potentially historic case now before the Supreme Court. The Florida resident helped hand-pick the plaintiffs involved and is paying the legal fees himself.
Why all the effort? Levy says he is driven to defend constitutional rights he believes are being trampled by the District of Columbia's strict ban on private ownership of handguns.
"I believe in the written Constitution and that the text ought to be interpreted the way it was meant to be," Levy said.
Levy, 66, didn't exactly try to keep his role secret as he and a small group of other lawyers crafted the case and shepherded it through the federal courts. He writes frequently about gun rights, stating a few years ago that Americans "deserve a foursquare pronouncement from the nation's highest court about the meaning of the Second Amendment." The high court hasn't directly ruled on gun rights in roughly 70 years.
And Levy freely acknowledges the case is manufactured, not one that bubbled up by chance from the district's steady flow of criminal cases involving guns. He wanted presentable plaintiffs to make a case for gun rights, not criminals.
"We didn't want crack heads and bank robbers to be poster boys for the Second Amendment," he said.
A former businessman who made millions in money management before going to law school at age 50, Levy is an attorney with the libertarian Cato Institute, though he says the handgun case is independent of his work there. He grew up in Washington and later lived in Maryland, but has since moved to Naples, Fla.
Washington's law was passed in 1976 in response to a spike in gun violence. But the city's murder rate was persistently high during much of the ban's existence, peaking at 479 in 1991 at the height of the crack epidemic. The rate has since plummeted but remains one of the highest in the nation.
Gun rights groups have long fought against the law, and Congress has tried several times to undercut it. But the case that made it to the high court has a more libertarian bent.
In fact, Levy sparred early on with the National Rifle Association, which feared the makeup of the Supreme Court at the time could lead to more restrictions on guns, not fewer. But the high court has since shifted to the right with appointments by President Bush (web|news|bio), and Levy said he and the NRA have made peace.
Levy long considered a legal challenge to the law, which city officials say is based on the idea that the Second Amendment protects the collective right of states to organize militias, not the right of individuals to own guns. Most courts and legal scholars long agreed with that view. But around 2002, several factors converged that convinced Levy he had his chance.
First, liberal legal scholars like Harvard's Laurence Tribe began to argue that the Second Amendment did protect individual rights. In 2001, a federal appellate court made the same conclusion, but still upheld the Texas law on transportation of firearms. Levy was also encouraged when the Justice Department under then Attorney General John Ashcroft supported individual rights in the same case.
Along with two other lawyers, including Alan Gura, who will argue the case in front of the Supreme Court, Levy tried to find plaintiffs to make his case. Through word of mouth, the group of lawyers sought out a diverse group, racially, economically and in age. One was a gay man, another a black woman who felt threatened by drug dealers, another a white security guard.
Only one plaintiff remains: Dick Heller, a security guard who applied for a handgun license in 2003 and was rejected under the district's handgun ban. The lower federal courts, while striking down the law, concluded only Heller was harmed by the city's law.
Heller says a legal group he belongs to, the Washington-based United States Bill of Rights Foundation, was planning its own challenge to the law when they learned Levy was looking for plaintiffs. Heller said his motivation was a 1997 case in which he said a homeowner was prosecuted after shooting a burglar who broke in.
"Any citizen can be drinking his coffee, eating his bagel on a Saturday morning and have his life threatened," said Heller, who owns three guns that he stores outside of Washington.
Levy won't say how much he is spending on the case, only that it is expensive. But he adds that what he pays Gura "probably violates the minimum wage laws."
He likes his chances, given the Supreme Court's makeup and lower court rulings on the issue of individual rights. And while defenders of the ban say it saves lives, Levy believes it strips citizens of their right to self protection.
"The worst possible solution is the one we have, where anybody who is a bad guy can get a gun any time they want, but the good people who want to defend themselves can't get one without breaking the law," he said.
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