Gun-rights supporters are expecting the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a Second Amendment case, this one involving a controversial appeals court decision over the open carry of firearms.

In a 7-4 ruling this week, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a Hawaii law that severely restricts unconcealed firearms to private detectives and security guards.

George Young, a Hawaii County resident, sued after he was turned down, twice, for a carry permit in 2011, Reason.com reported this week.

Reason, a libertarian-leaning website,pointed out that dissenting judges blasted the Young v. Hawaii ruling for suggesting the 2nd Amendment doesn’t extend beyond the home.

“The Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees ‘the right of the people to keep and bear Arms,'” Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain writes in the dissent that was joined by Judges Consuelo Callahan, Sandra Ikuta, and Ryan Nelson.

“Today,” O’Scannlain continued, “a majority of our court has decided that the Second Amendment does not mean what it says. Instead, the majority holds that while the Second Amendment may guarantee the right to keep a firearm for self-defense within one’s home, it provides no right whatsoever to bear—i.e., to carry—that same firearm for self-defense in any other place.”

Amy Swearer of The Heritage Foundation calls the 9th Circuit decision a “bad day” for the 2nd Amendment because of the “awful” ruling, but she predicts to One News Now the issue is not over.

“The good thing, the silver lining here, if there is any,” she says, “is that this seems to be the next issue primed for the [U.S.] Supreme Court to take up.”

The high court has produced back-to-back landmark 2nd Amendment decisions, such as the Heller ruling in 2008 that found every American citizen has the right to possess and use a firearm for self-defense in their home. Two years later, the McDonald decision struck down restrictive gun laws imposed by the City of Chicago.

Reason senior editor Jacob Sullum writes that Heller did not address possessing a firearm away from the home so the 9th Circuit pulled two words from Heller — “longstanding prohibitions” – and used that as the basis for a ruling that went back to colonial days when firearms were not allowed in the public square in some towns and villages.

The court also admitted, Sullum writes, that some colonies not only allowed public carry but mandated it.

In the dissent, Judge O’Scannlain wrote that fellow judges reached a “startling conclusion” that banning firearms outside the home does not impede on the right to “bear” arms.

Alan Gottlieb of Second Amendment Foundation tells One News Now the Supreme Court’s rulings in Heller and McDonald make the Young case an important one for the court to take up.

It will not go unnoticed by the Supreme Court justices, he adds, that the dissent in Young “makes a mockery” of the 7-4 ruling, and that will help convince the Supreme Court to hear the case.

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Copyright American Family News. Reprinted with permission.

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