In relation to what Chris posted, I am betting that the decision will be akin to # 3.
Amen to that. If only for the pragmatic reason that it'll have to be worded that way to get Justice Kennedy on board. my gut tells me that it's better than 60/40 that we'll get our "Heller Win", but that there will indeed be "reasonable restrictions" verbiage of some kind in the decision, and incorporation into the 14th may well be left for yet another decade or century to come.
What will happen:
- We will celebrate our "win".
The anti's will begin immediate spin that "They've only wanted reasonable restrictions all along..."
And we will duke out in the legislature and the courts for the next seventy five years what "reasonable restrictions" actually means.
However diluted it may be, a win will be important. It will at least set a ratchet point past which we can never be pushed again. Probably an NYC, NJ, or California-like level of restrictions. Granted, most people here would consider even that level of RKBA to be TEOTWAWKI, but
it's a start.I also see a slight possibility that D.C. will stoop to such spine twisting sophistry in their arguments, that maybe, just maybe, we'll even get a liberal justice defector, if only because they felt their intelligence was insulted just a bit too far...
I am feeling positive about this. I think all the legitimate constitutional scholarship obviously backs our side, and all the papers and writings of the framers, both the Federalist and anti-Federalist papers, for instance, clearly intended that RKBA be an individual right. The one issue that muddies the waters a bit is that while the Second Amendment is indeed an individual right
, the collective right is also in there. The definitions of "well regulated" and "militia" of the time of the founding clearly show that the exercise of the collective right of the Second Amendment during peacetime is virtually indistinguishable from the practice of the individual right anyway. Put simply, it's just citizens with privately held arms either way.
The whole subordinate clause militia talk of how the individual right fosters the collective was a last minute addendum to appease anti-federalists about something that probably should not have been in the BOR, but in the Constitution proper. Although it's probably a good thing. If they hadn't, we'd probably be screwed. The individual RKBA was such a given assumption at the time, that perhaps they may have almost not bothered to include it.
