Elena Kagan said as a U.S. Supreme Court law clerk in 1987 that she was “not sympathetic” toward a man who contended that his constitutional rights were violated when he was convicted for carrying an unlicensed pistol.

By Greg Stohr and Kristin Jensen at Bloomberg.com

Kagan, whom President Barack Obama nominated to the high court this week, made the comment to Justice Thurgood Marshall, urging him in a one-paragraph memo to vote against hearing the District of Columbia man’s appeal.

The man’s “sole contention is that the District of Columbia’s firearms statutes violate his constitutional right to ‘keep and bear arms,’” Kagan wrote. “I’m not sympathetic.”

Kagan, currently the U.S. solicitor general, has made few public remarks about the Constitution’s Second Amendment. The Supreme Court in 2008 ruled, in a case that overturned the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, that the Constitution protects individual gun rights.

As a nominee to be solicitor general last year, Kagan told lawmakers that she accepted that 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller as a precedent of the court.

“There is no question, after Heller, that the Second Amendment guarantees individuals the right to keep and bear arms and that this right, like others in the Constitution, provides strong although not unlimited protection against governmental regulation,” she said.

Review Denied

The Heller decision left room for states to require registration of weapons. The majority also said the ruling didn’t cast doubt on laws barring handgun possession by convicted felons and the mentally ill, or restrictions on bringing guns into schools or government buildings.

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