Document ID: ./input/supremecourt_opinions/opinions/boundvolumes/529bv.pdf
Page Number: 686.0

529US3

Unit: $U54

[10-04-01 09:35:40] PAGES PGT: OPIN

Cite as: 529 U. S. 598 (2000)

611

Opinion of the Court

elsewhere, substantially affect any sort of interstate com-
merce”); see also id., at 573–574 (Kennedy, J., concurring)
(stating that Lopez did not alter our “practical conception
of commercial regulation” and that Congress may “regulate
in the commercial sphere on the assumption that we have a
single market and a uniﬁed purpose to build a stable national
economy”), 577 (“Were the Federal Government to take over
the regulation of entire areas of traditional state concern,
areas having nothing to do with the regulation of commercial
activities, the boundaries between the spheres of federal
and state authority would blur”), 580 (“[U]nlike the earlier
cases to come before the Court here neither the actors nor
their conduct has a commercial character, and neither the
purposes nor the design of the statute has an evident com-
mercial nexus. The statute makes the simple possession
of a gun within 1,000 feet of the grounds of the school
In a sense any conduct in this inter-
a criminal offense.
dependent world of ours has an ultimate commercial origin
or consequence, but we have not yet said the commerce
power may reach so far” (citation omitted)). Lopez’s review
of Commerce Clause case law demonstrates that in those
cases where we have sustained federal regulation of intra-
state activity based upon the activity’s substantial effects
on interstate commerce, the activity in question has been
some sort of economic endeavor. See id., at 559–560.4

The second consideration that we found important in
analyzing § 922(q) was that the statute contained “no ex-
press jurisdictional element which might limit its reach to
a discrete set of ﬁrearm possessions that additionally have

4 Justice Souter’s dissent does not reconcile its analysis with our
holding in Lopez because it apparently would cast that decision aside.
See post, at 637–643. However, the dissent cannot persuasively contradict
Lopez’s conclusion that, in every case where we have sustained federal
regulation under the aggregation principle in Wickard v. Filburn, 317
U. S. 111 (1942), the regulated activity was of an apparent commercial
character. See, e. g., Lopez, 514 U. S., at 559–560, 580.