Not to mention that Constitutional language that says something about those arms having something to do with the militia.
We need a much better ruling than Scalia's hot mess of a Heller Decision.
Between the
Heller decision and the
McDonald decision, the SCOTUS has pretty effectively blown that militia connection out of the water.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/07pdf/07-290.pdf1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home. Pp. 2–53.
(a) The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms. Pp. 2–22.
That wasn't the problem with Scalia's
Heller decision. The problem areas were:
2. Like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited. It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose: For example, concealed weapons prohibitions have been upheld under the Amendment or state analogues. The Court’s opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.
And
Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited. From Blackstone through the 19th-century cases, commentators and courts rouÂtinely explained that the right was not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.
If the Second Amendment is not unlimited, then WTF does "shall not be infringed" mean?
The decision is 157 pages long. I remember reading something in it, which I can't find now, about the case not addressing other "presumptively lawful" firearms regulations. That, along with the "no right is unlimited" part, is the source of the problems with
Heller, because lower courts are relying on "presumptively lawful" as justification to declare other anti-gun laws a having been blessed by the SCOTUS when, in fact, all Mr. Scalia was saying was "We haven't looked at those yet."