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Convicted Policeman Loses Gun Case
By RICHARD CARELLI
.c The Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - A former Indianapolis policeman who says he had a right to carry a gun even after pleading guilty to a domestic-violence crime lost a Supreme Court appeal today.
The court, without comment, turned away Gerald Gillespie's constitutional challenge to a 1996 federal law that took away his gun and cost him his job.
Today's action marks the second time in the past three months the nation's highest court has let Congress continue banning anyone - including police officers - from possessing a gun after a domestic-violence conviction.
The justices last October rejected a similar challenge mounted by the Fraternal Order of Police.
Neither action likely will quell the debate over the Constitution's Second Amendment's scope, hotly contested in the political fight over gun control.
Gillespie contended, among other things, that the amendment bars Congress from telling a state or city police department who can and cannot possess a gun.
His case has its roots in a 1968 federal law barring convicted felons from owning or possessing a gun. The law contains an exception for federal, state and local government officials. Congress extended the gun ban in 1996 to anyone convicted of a domestic-violence misdemeanor, and did not exempt federal, state and local government officials.
Gillespie in 1995 had pleaded guilty to a battery charge involving his ex-wife. Because of that, Indianapolis police officials decided he could no longer carry a gun.
And because every city police officer must be trained and equipped to possess and use a gun, Gillespie lost the job he had held for more than 25 years. He sued but a federal judge and appeals court ruled against him.
The 7th U.S. Circuit Court, in its decision last July, noted that the Supreme Court historically has had little to say about the Second Amendment's scope. In 1939 it said there is no right to own a sawed-off shotgun in the absence of ``some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.''
The amendment states: ``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.''
In Gillespie's case, the appeals court said the 1939 ruling and others ``do confirm that the Second Amendment establishes no right to possess a firearm apart from ... maintaining a state militia.''
The appeals court said Gillespie ``has not convinced us that he can demonstrate a reasonable relationship between his own inability to carry a firearm and the preservation or efficiency of a well-regulated militia.''
The case is Gillespie vs. Indianapolis, 99-626.