The New York Times has reported the Justice Department has reversed decades of government policy on the meaning of the Second Amendment by telling the Supreme Court for the first time that the Constitution "broadly protects the rights of individuals" to own firearms.

The position was expressed in a footnote in two briefs filed by Solicitor General Theodore Olson and incorporated the view that Attorney General John Ashcroft expressed a year ago ina letter to the National Rifle Association. Ashcroft said he "unequivocally" believed that "the text and the original intent of the Second Amendment clearly protect the right of individuals to keep and bear firearms."

It was not clear at the time whether the letter to the NRA simply expressed Ashcroft’s long-held personal opinion or marked a departure in government policy. The Supreme Court’s view has been that the Second Amendment protected only those rights that have "some reasonable relationship" to the preservation of efficiency of a well-regulated militia," as the court put it in United States v. Miller, a 1939 decision that remains the court’s latest word on the subject.

However, it has been evident that Ashcroft has been setting new policy since last fall. In October, the federal appeals court in New Orleans, saying it did not find the Miller decision persuasive, declared that "the Second Amendment does protect individual rights," which nonetheless could be subject to "limited, narrowly tailored specific exceptions."

Ashcroft quickly sent a letter to all federal prosecutors’ calling their attention to the decision in United State v. Emerson and informing them that "in my view, the Emerson opinion, and the balance it strikes, generally reflect the current understanding of the Second Amendment." He told the prosecutors to inform the department’s criminal division of any case that raised a Second Amendment question so the department could "coordinate all briefing in those cases" and enforce federal law "in a manner the heeds the commands of the Constitution."