Hollerin’ About Heller
Posted on June 26, 2008 at 11:25 amMore reactions to the Supreme Court’s Heller ruling by the Tennessee blogosphere.
What has changed? Well, the militia provision inside the 2nd amendment has been ruled unimportant, and therefore the individual right to keep and bear arms has been affirmed. Score for English majors.
Either you believe in the Constitution, or you don’t. And Obama’s “bitter” comment may well prove to be a ghost that haunts him.
Isn’t that awesome? The supreme court says… Never mind that the Constitution has already been saying it for 200 years.
While narrow in scope, this is a great day for Constitutional liberty.
Wow. Guess they settled that quite definitively. Let the parsing begin!
Gun owners everywhere must be stoked right now. I live in Chicago - which has a handgun ban throughout the city. How many lawsuits will the NRA be filing today? Probably, a few.
Scalia also well-damaged the dissents of Justices Stevens and Breyer, who seemed much more selective in their summary of the history of the Second Amendment. Breyer’s historical focus was on municipal regulations with minor penalties (unlike the criminal penalty inherent in the District of Columbia law), and puzzlingly, proposed the adoption of an “interest balancing inquiry”, which I suppose is some long-lost cousin of the rational basis test, to determine whether firearm regulations were proper.
Before reading the Stevens’s dissent, it is helpful to first imagine flames shooting out of this mouth.
If you don’t want to read the whole thing, some relevant quotes from the majority opinion can be found here. And here’s an initial analysis from SCOTUSblog’s Lyle Denniston — although, as the Volokh Conspiracy’s Orin Kerr says, “the details of the opinion are critical; it will take a bit of time to read the decision to get a sense of what it means.”
And, of course, constant updates, clarification, opinions and asides from Say Uncle and Instapundit.
