Libertarian fighting D.C. gun ban lives part time in Asheville

All roads lead to Asheville, of course. Bloomberg.com has an interesting profile on Robert Levy, the “driving force” behind an effort to challenge D.C.’s handgun ban. Levy lives part time in Asheville. Here you go:

Feb. 19 (Bloomberg) — Robert Levy, the man paying for a U.S. Supreme Court challenge to the District of Columbia’s handgun ban, has built his own financial-data business and enrolled in law school as a 50-year-old.

The one thing he has never done is own a gun.

“Here in Bay Colony, it’s not quite the high-risk crime area that might require a gun,” he said during lunch by the pool at his Naples, Florida, club.

Levy, 66, is a driving force behind a case that may confer a constitutional right for individuals to own a firearm. The libertarian scholar helped put the lawsuit together — over the objections of the National Rifle Association — and now is before the nation’s highest court in the only case he has ever filed as a lawyer.

Levy, a fellow at the Washington-based Cato Institute, which supports limited government, says he is motivated solely by principle — so much so that he has sunk tens of thousands of dollars into the case. He has refused offers of financial assistance to avoid any risk of losing control of it.

“You have to expect that people who pay the piper end up wanting to call the tune,” said Levy, a Washington native who now splits his time between Naples and Asheville, North Carolina. “We didn’t want that.”

…

The case, which is to be argued March 18 and decided by the end of June, represents a gamble for gun-rights advocates. None of the court’s nine justices has ever considered whether the Constitution’s Second Amendment gives individuals, or just state militias, the right to bear arms.

At first, the National Rifle Association tried to persuade Levy and the two other lawyers not to challenge the Washington ban.

“There was a real difference of opinion among the attorneys as to whether the case should be brought” because the issue is uncharted territory for the high court, said Wayne LaPierre, chief executive officer of the Fairfax, Virginia-based NRA.

Levy and his two colleagues — lawyers Clark Neily and Alan Gura — decided the risk was worth taking. They reasoned that the composition of the Supreme Court, should the case reach that level, would be more favorable than it had been in decades. They also figured they could point to recent scholarship by such liberals as Harvard Law School professor Laurence Tribe in support of Second Amendment protection for individuals.