Reader comments
A correct ruling on gun rights

I agree, but meanwhile the 4th amendment is pretty well shot.

This is great news indeed. Now we need to expand the definition of firearms to include RPGs, bazookas, and howitzers.

Yep, now with that ruling the NRA and GOP have prevailed. Congratulations to them, they have now lost the election year wedge issue.

Now what are the 2nd Ammendment voters going to pick as their single issue to vote on? What is the NRA Political Action Committee going to do with their money???

Anyone have an answer? I would really like to know.

I agree with the premise of your essay lauding the decision of the Supreme Court with regard to the personal possession of hand guns. Despite the tragic statistics related to handgun deaths in this country, the right to own a handgun must be protected.

However, your reference to the number of handgun murders in the city of Washington is misleading at best. The number of handgun murders in Washington DC has remained constant primarily because the law is ineffective as long as neighboring states, like Virginia where I live, allow the free and unsupervised purchase of handguns. The low murder rates in other nations who partially or totally ban guns would defy your reasoning. At Virginia Tech University, there are 32 dead students whose loss can attest to how this precious right has been abused. I hope not to hear from those who would suggest that arming the students on campus would have saved lives. Common sense tells me that argument is false. While we guarantee individual rights to bear arms, we must find ways to bring sanity to a culture that seems to nullify the value of human life.

Interesting how the DesNews only quotes liberal Democrats on their response. Funny how only those who were so strongly opposed to gun control now come out and say how wonderful this ruling is. Makes one wonder if they ever read, or even heard of, the Constitution before. It is nice, for once, to see that liberty from government oppression is sustained.

Same old anti-freedom, pro marxist drivel from the
same old diehard red-diaper doper babies.
If you cannot handle freedom and responsibility, may
I invite you to leave, and lamonte if you are so concerned about human life, how about you start with
the innocent life of butchered children, in the abortion mills, throughout America.

Under this great ruling states can still ban specific guns, asign waiting periods and keep guns out of public buldings.

This is kind of a peric victory. The government retains control.

COSMO - Although I hesitate to respond to your childish diatribe I feel I must correct an assumption you have so totally misstated about me and my beliefs. Although the subject matter at hand has nothing to do with "abortion mills" you have made out outrageous assertion that I must refute. My religious beliefs, with regard to abortion, fall in line with the First Presidency of the LDS Church. I believe in the sanctity of life whether we are discussing an unborn child, an innocent victim of senseless crime or the unfortunate death of soldiers sent off to fight an unwarranted war.

You have no right to assume any of the claims you have made in your comment.

I haven't read the whole thing yet, but my initial take is that it was a good decision as far as it goes. But this was really an easy case, once you got over the textual disagreement. The hard part will be applying it to other gun laws that are less blatantly violative of the amendment.

Imagine that it was unclear whether or not a particular religious sect was in fact a religion entitled to First Amendment protection. We'll call them the Mormons. Now imagine a patchwork of laws banning Mormons from doing all kinds of things: getting on airplanes, going into national parks, failing to register as a Mormon. Finally, a law is passed banning Mormonism altogether.

What would you think of the Supreme Court if it threw out that last law, finding a First Amendment right to be a Mormon, but purported to allow all those other laws to stand? Well, that's pretty much what it just did with gun rights.

Believe me, the heavy lifting is yet to come! (unanswered question number one: does 2A limit the states as well as the federal governement?)

"When guns are outlawed, only the government will have guns."

Try a good professional therapist, Cosmo.

To COSMO: Is that You Michael Weiner Savage?

Seems to me that the only person I have heard use the line "red-diaper doper babies" is Mr. Weiner.

Your perspective - if you don't like it leave, is so mature.

I bet you whined about the Supreme Court last week when they said we could not execute child rapists. Does that mean you are going to leave, knowing your mantra "if you don't like it leave."

The Supreme Court has ruled and owing a gun is still a 2nd Amendment Right. I have always believed that. But there are still those who would take that right away. They want us back into the days of swords, knives, axes and bludgeoning tools. We now see that some of those so called countries who have gun control have high murder rates with knives and other stabbing and bludgeoning instruments and many others are beginning to catch up. Only those skilled in the use of those stabbing and bludgeoning instruments will be able to protect themselves and the criminal will continue to commit the crimes and the murders and most will not be able to protect themselves. The gun is the true equalizer and true deterrent to the criminal. That has been proven over and over. In 25 years of law enforcement most assaults were with fists, clubs, knives, bats and other instruments and in most cases the victims had no way to protect themselves.
The injuries sustained were minor up to and including death. An armed society is a safer society, period! I just read of 3 stabbings in Japan in the news paper!

False. Australia saw a significant downturn both in firearm deaths and homicide incident rate each of the four years after their gun buyback program began. There IS a correlation between the availability of firearms and firearm crime, regardless of what your blind ideology says about it.

Amazing how the Right complains about "activist judges" yet this decision is so far off the plain text of the constitution. In this case it's the conservative wing that are activist. This just proves that all judges are activist - whether you see them that way depends on where you stand on an issue.

According to the Australian Government Crime Facts and Figures that is printed by the Australian Government, you need to get yourself properly educated about their crime facts and figures. It isn't what you think!
Now for my blind ideology. Since I retired from law enforcement I obtained a concealed weapon permit and since that time My gun has saved me from bodily injury and possible death on 4 occasions. So I will say it again. "An armed society is a safer society, period".

Please note in the Virginia Tech murders, 30 out of 32 murders happened after police arrive at the campus.

Let's say that a hungry bear wanders into a school. What would be the appropriate response? Lock all the doors so that the bear would have a difficult time breaking into each class. And if the bear was within a classroom when the lockdown occurred, persuade the to limit his attention to only those within that specific class room? Or perhaps if the teacher had appropriate training, he/she could reason with the bear and persuade it to live a peaceful life, eating berries and grass.

Criminals have guns, and most of them have never been purchased. If guns are banned, criminals have the option of arming themselves with other weapons, or actually manufacturing firearms themselves. And the government has guns, and is willing to impose its will on an unarmed populous.

For anyone who takes a reasoned logical look at statistics, private gun ownership decreases crime (violent crime in particular) in virtually all cases. This indeed should have been a 9-0 decision.

Mike 10:20 am - Those are excellent points. In this morning's Washington Post E.J. Dionne puts it this way:

The court's five most conservative members have demonstrated that for all of Justice Antonin Scalia's talk about "originalism" as a coherent constitutional doctrine, those on the judicial right regularly succumb to the temptation to legislate from the bench. They fall in line behind whatever fashions political conservatism is promoting.

Conservative justices claim that they defer to local authority. Not in this case. They insist that political questions should be decided by elected officials. Not in this case. They argue that they pay careful attention to the precise words of the Constitution. Not in this case.

The United States and its gun owners have done perfectly well since 1939, when an earlier Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment as implying a collective right to bear arms, but not an individual right.

Here is what the Second Amendment says: "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

Mike, I think your comments falol right in line with this reasoning. Thanks.

Great editorial and may I add that the dissenting justices should be in prison right now. It's unbelievable that Ginsberg, Breyer, Stevens and that other Marxist could read the second amendment and come to the conclusion that they did. Frightening.
And Lamonte, evidently you have a Government job as you seem to spend lots of time posting on the dn website - and it wasn't an "essay" - it was an editorial.

As Justice Scalia noted, leading legal scholars have looked at the history of "the right to keep and bear arms" and have reported in distinguished legal journals that, what do you know, "the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" means exactly what it says. The prefatory language about the need for a capable militia means a force that, like the armed citizens that rebelled against Great Britain, the same citizens who ratified the 2nd Amendment, is made up of the free men of the nation with their own weapons. Britain had already suffered from kings who suppressed rebellion by confiscating personal firearms, and the Revolutionary War began when the Redcoats tried to confiscate the arms of the citizens of Concord, Massachusetts. To claim that government can ban handguns is to destroy the ability to form the kind of citizen militia that fought at Concord and Lexington in April, 1775, so emphasis on the "militia" clause does not support a gun ban either. As the constitutions of the original 13 states show, personal ownership and use of firearms was seen to benefit defense of both the person and the community.