Some real concerns from the NYT:
By agreeing yesterday to rule on whether provisions of the District of Columbia’s stringent gun control law violate the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Court has inserted itself into a roiling public controversy with large ramifications for public safety. The court’s move sowed hope and fear among supporters of reasonable gun control, and it ratcheted up the suspense surrounding the court’s current term.
The rights recognized by the Constitution are more important than the irrelevant hopes and fears of supporters of "reasonable gun control". That is precisely the contraversy, whether a ban is "reasonable" considering the RKBA.
The hope, which we share, is that the court will rise above the hard-right ideology of some justices to render a decision respectful of the Constitution’s text and the violent consequences of denying government broad room to regulate guns. The fear is that it will not.
Again, what is this silliness concerning fear? Are we to judge all laws based on the fear that they generate? What about the "fear" of unarmed people to crime? Or the fear of gun confiscation? Are we then to repeal the Civil rights act because some people fear Blacks?
At issue is a 2-to-1 ruling last March by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that found unconstitutional a law barring handguns in homes and requiring that shotguns and rifles be stored with trigger locks or disassembled. The ruling upheld a radical decision by a federal trial judge, who struck down the 31-year-old gun control law on spurious grounds that conform with the agenda of the anti-gun control lobby but cry out for rejection by the Supreme Court.
Why is the decision to stike down the law "radical" and the grounds for doing so "spurious'? It is also quite overt for the NYT to label gun rights people as "anti-gun control lobby".
Opponents of gun control sometimes claim a constitutional prohibition on any serious regulation of individual gun ownership. The court last weighed in on the amendment in 1939, concluding, correctly in our view, that the only absolute right conferred on individuals is for the private ownership of guns that has “some reasonable relationship to the preservation of efficiency of a well-regulated militia.” The federal, state and local governments may impose restrictions on other uses — like the trigger guards — or outright bans on types of weapons. Appellate courts followed that interpretation, until last spring’s departure.
This is an absolute and intentional misquote of
US v Miller. Appeals ALWAYS rule on the narrow limits f the previous ruling. The Supreme court ruled of the imposition of a "tax" on a sawed off shotgun that it had deemed not the type of weapon used by a militia, not on the merits of a ban.
A lot has changed since the nation’s founding, when people kept muskets to be ready for militia service. What has not changed is the actual language of the Constitution. To get past the first limiting clauses of the Second Amendment to find an unalienable individual right to bear arms seems to require creative editing.
The first part of the 2nd Amendment isn't a limiting clause. The purposeful and misleading interpretation is meant to justify infringement of the RKBA. The next thing they will do is define the "militia" in terms that restrict most people from being in one.
That argument is without merit. The militia consists of All military age males in the country. If you disarm the male citizens of the country with a DC type ban, you have disarmed the militia and violated the amendment anyway. To argue that the militia is
only national Guard members, and only when called up, is ludicrous. Why would national Guardsmen need to have a "right" to be armed when on active duty? In a similiar way, if the 2nd Amendment protects the "state's rights to maintain a militia, then every federal gun control law is unconstitutional. For example, I live in Texas, and Texas has a state milita, the Texas State Guard, that is not subject to call up by the federal government and isn't part of the National Guard. The Texas Constitution has a RKBA provision that lacks the preamble of the 2nd Amendment, and no "limiting language" or rather something that can be called limiting language to justify trashing the right. Anyway, it does contain language concerning carry in public. Now why then are automatic weapons banned in Texas? It's not because the Texas Constitution allows it, it's because of federal gun control law. Therefore, the federal law supercedes the State Constitution, and would violate the state "right" of maintaining a militia.
So, even if the preamble to the 2nd Amendment was a limiting factor, no male citizen would be subject to gun control.