sekhmets D: What Heller did was completely reverse 200+ years of history and judicial rulings. Prior to Heller the 2nd amendment was not legally viewed as a right for individuals to own guns (Thomas introduced the language of that right in an earlier ruling for which he wrote a concurring opinion in 1997)
Concur with your first sentence, SD, I consider the heller 2008 ruling a subversion of the 2ndA. It's chocked full of misrepresentations, fraudulent portrayals, half truths & tortured reasoning as well.
The ruling creates a bit of a conundrum for obama admin (I'm a staunch dem btw), for they are on record saying, recently to mitigate, 'I support the individual right to keep & bear arms' etcetra, yada yada.
.. Joe, Barack, this heller decision was the ruling of a split 5-4 court, and what you are saying is that you agree with the 5 rightwing justices scalia, alito, thomas, roberts & kennedy, and DISAGREE with the 4 liberal justices ginsburg, sotomayor, souter, & stevens who dissented that it was a militia based right to keep & bear arms.
See the conundrum? How can it be that Joe & Barack are supporting the 5 rightwing justices on this, while tossing the 4 liberal justices under the bus?
.. now there is a bit of wiggle room, in that there are actually 3 interpretations of 2ndA, one the pure militia based RKBA, the other the 'broad' individual (nra version) RKBA, and a third which is a 'narrow individual RKBA' which is really the militia based RKBA with an adjunct narrow individual right to own a gun (in that it wasn't disallowed to keep one at home). So by saying one believes in an individual RKBA could be clever way of using the 'narrow individual RKBA'. The nra only supports the broad individual RKBA.
The supreme court ruling in 1939 2ndA case, frank miller, was a 9-0 unanimous ruling for the militia based RKBA (despite what nra spindoctors have manipulated it into).
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