Rejoice with Jerusalem, says the Lord in this Sunday’s reading from the Book of Isaiah, while the psalmist encourages all to “shout joyfully.” Gun-rights advocates rejoiced after a 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision restraining government limits on gun ownership. Gun-control advocates took some solace in the fact that the decision does not bar all regulation of guns.

Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., writing for the majority, said a right to self-defense is protected by the Second Amendment of the Constitution and fundamental to the American conception of ordered liberty. Such fundamental protections, he said, limit not only federal power but also that of state and local governments.

The ruling is an enormous symbolic victory for supporters of gun rights, but its short-term practical effect is unclear. The justices left for another day just what kinds of gun-control laws can be reconciled with Second Amendment protection. The majority said little more than that there is a right to keep handguns in the home for self-defense.

Observers say there are two sets of laws likely to be struck down by judges as a result of the ruling: state and local gun laws that prohibit people from carrying firearms outside the home, and burdensome registration requirements.

An explosion of cases likely will keep courts busy for years defining gun control’s new limits. Legal challenges already are pending against several state and big-city gun laws.

Local officials around the country expressed confidence that their regulations would hold up under legal scrutiny, but many scholars were not so sure. “I think a lot of these will fall,” said Temple University law professor David Kairys, a gun-control proponent. “Can you limit people’s ability to carry concealed weapons, or open weapons? That’s noticeably absent from the majority’s list of what you can do.”

On the other hand, Eugene Volokh, a UCLA law school professor who has written extensively on constitutional issues, predicted challenges to the ban on assault rifles will fail because judges will conclude that people still will be “free to have lots and lots of guns.” But he said attempts to eliminate carrying restrictions probably will fare better because gun-rights advocates can argue that their right to self-defense means that they should be able to carry their weapons almost wherever they want, with exceptions for government buildings and schools.

Family Violence Prevention Fund lawyer Jennifer White said she expects stepped-up challenges to laws that seek to keep guns out of the hands of people convicted of domestic violence. “It would be a horrible danger to battered women and children if that aspect of the law is eliminated,” White said.

Source: Articles by Adam Liptak for the New York Times and Mark Sherman for Associated Press