Quote:
Originally posted by Gattigap
LA Times
- The Supreme Court set the stage Tuesday for a historic ruling on whether the fiercely debated 2nd Amendment protects the rights of Americans to keep handguns at home.
The justices said they would review an appeals court decision that struck down a 31-year-old ban on handguns in Washington, D.C. The case will be heard early next year and decided by next summer.
While outright bans on the private possession of guns are rare, many cities and states regulate firearms. If the high court rules in favor of gun owners, the decision could open the door to challenges to regulations and restrictions on firearms across the nation.
Me, I'm thinking that this will all end up in a 5-4 decision (penned by Kennedy) in which the majority finds that the 2nd Amendment protects civilian ownership of only 22-caliber or less, while Scalia's scathing dissent points out the prevalence of trebuchets in colonial backyards, which therefore permits citizens to own and possess anything short of fissile material, which of course can only be possessed by Federal agents or terrorist networks.
Gattigap
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I've never understood how the supposed original intent of the framers of the Second Amendment is supposed to trump the plain language, which indicates pretty clearly that the purpose of the amendment is to ensure a well-regulated militia, as opposed to deer-hunting or self-protection, as worthy as those goals are. The NRA deals with this problem by just omitting the inconvenient part of the text.
eta: I think Eugene Volokh pretty much concedes the point:
- The Second Amendment as written was meant to apply only to the federal government, and can only apply to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment. Thus, when we consider what the Second Amendment means with regard to state laws, we shouldn't look at what people in 1791 thought of the right-to-bear arms we should look at what people in 1868 thought the Fourteenth Amendment would do as to the right-to-bear arms.
If we do that, we see that while in 1791 the Framers did think of the right as largely aimed at societal self-defense, including defense against government tyranny albeit self-defense that would be assured through individual gun ownership in 1868, people saw the right as also focused on private arms ownership aimed at protection against crime.
If the text doesn't provide an individual right, and the framers so understood that in 1791, why isn't that the end of the inquiry? If you have a problem with the notion that the Bill of Rights applies to the states as well as the federal government, that's a distinct issue, but it shouldn't be a pretext to read modern preferences into the Second Amendment.
