Kevin at The Smallest Majority puts up the go-to post for the judicial history of the Second Amendment.
Washington D.C. versus Heller will be argued before the Supreme Court later this month, the first case in almost seventy years to explicitly pit a law against the Right to Keep and Bear Arms. Kevin lays out how the question even comes up.
All you folks who think the slippery slope is inherently a fallacy, this is the existence proof that the slope exists, and works as advertised.
Go. Read. As you hold yourself a free citizen, this is mandatory. There will be no more important Supreme Court case in your lifetime. There may be worse cases to come, laws and rulings that take bigger and bigger bites out of your freedom, but if things do go bad, this is the case that will start the avalanche.
This is it. This is the case wherein the U.S. may finally and fully cut itself loose, and declare the Constitution mere guidelines, a mere road sign, not foundation and framework.
Note well: If the Supreme Court fails to fully uphold Heller the Constitution, it is time to buy guns, not to give them up; time to dig guns up, not to bury them; time to remind Those Who Would Rule who their bosses are. Either the Court holds the line, and gives us firm ground to stand on, or the Great Contract is null and void. The Constitution binds the Government, not us.
If the Court will not defend our rights, then it’s our job.
[update]
Lauren Buechner and Fritz Ernemann at Cornell have an excellent, and to my eye, well-balanced summary of the main points in Heller, as put forth in some of the key briefs before the Court.
It is flawed in its first paragraph by naming the respondent as Joseph Heller (the Catch-22 novelist) and not Dick Heller (the security guard who is trusted with a firearm when guarding people more important that you or I, but not in his own home). I’m sure I’m not the only person to email the authors asking for a correction, and I trust the error will be fixed soon.
Turk Turon caught the mistake over at Of Arms and the Law.
[update]
I emailed Buechner and Ernemann, and they have fixed the name problem. They are taking the confer v. protect controversy seriously and are reviewing their position, but at this point believe their usage is consistent with the Court’s, and they do not intend to slant their discussion one way or another on the main points.
C. Cannon and D. King have both posted what I believe to be a reasonable argument for “confer” in the discussion thread at Arms and the law.