07:33 AM PDT on Friday, June 24, 2005

By CHARLES E. BEGGS, Associated Press Writer

SALEM -- A law barring felons from having guns doesn't violate the right to bear arms under the Oregon Constitution, the Oregon Supreme Court ruled Thursday.

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The court said certain groups of people are "identifiable threats" to safety and that their rights can be limited.

The ruling is the first one by the court "especially dealing with the issue of possession of firearms by felons," said Kevin Neely, spokesman for Attorney General Hardy Myers.

"This confirms the state's authority to regulate firearms for public safety," he said.

The court unanimously said that framers of the state constitution didn't intend to "deprive the Legislature of the authority to restrict arms possession to the extent that such regulation of arms is necessary to protect the public safety."

The constitution, adopted in 1859, says people "shall have the right to bear arms for the defense of themselves."

The ruling involved two cases in which defendants argued that the law, versions of which date to 1925, is unconstitutionally overbroad by forbidding all felons from possessing firearms.

Tracing the history of constitutional rights to have weapons, the court said in both "17th-century England and in colonial America, society viewed the criminal element as a segment of the population that the law-abiding citizenry was obliged to hunt down and bring to justice."

A common theme of early weapons restrictions, the court said, was protecting the public from "identifiable threats to the public safety, such as serious criminal conduct."

That Legislature has authority to designate certain groups as posing such threats and to restrict their rights to guns, the court said in an opinion by Justice Robert Durham.

He said, though, that lawmakers' power to restrict gun possession is not unlimited and must involve the protection of public safety.

Durham said singling out felons for a gun possession ban affects the people who violate "society's most essential rules for obligatory conduct -- rules that are central to the legislative task of protecting the public from violence and various forms of abuse."