[hga]

I will admit that I have mixed feelings about the Second Amendment. As does the Supreme Court; Heller was a 5-4 decision, in which the minority disagreed with the interpretation of the text that you claim is plain and indisputable.

Wrong. All 9 Supremes interpreted it as an individual right, they could hardly do else so given the written history of all this and the plain language of the Bill of Rights (which amendments, after all, confer a collective vs. individual right?). What they split 5-4 on what did that really mean anything in practice, or, ultimately, could D.C. freeze its registration, and require to you keep your guns unloaded and disassembled until an intruder entered the room you were in.

A set of laws I'll note were often nullified by sympathetic juries. Since Heller and McDonald, a majority of the court clearly holds that you only have a right to keep and bear arms in your home, they've denied cert on all relevant appeals since McDonald.

[ScottBurson]

> All 9 Supremes interpreted it as an individual right

No. There were two dissents, one by Stevens, one by Breyer. From Wikipedia [0]:

The Stevens dissent seems to rest on four main points of disagreement: that the Founders would have made the individual right aspect of the Second Amendment express if that was what was intended; that the "militia" preamble and exact phrase "to keep and bear arms" demands the conclusion that the Second Amendment touches on state militia service only; that many lower courts' later "collective-right" reading of the Miller decision constitutes stare decisis, which may only be overturned at great peril; and that the Court has not considered gun-control laws (e.g., the National Firearms Act) unconstitutional. The dissent concludes, "The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.... I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice."

Justice Stevens' dissent was joined by Justices David Souter, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Stephen Breyer.

Justice Breyer filed a separate dissenting opinion, joined by the same dissenting Justices, which sought to demonstrate that, starting from the premise of an individual-rights view, the District of Columbia's handgun ban and trigger lock requirement would nevertheless be permissible limitations on the right.

You must be thinking of the Breyer dissent. Even that does not stipulate that the right is individual, but just argues that even if it is, the DC law was permissible.

Even people who agree with you on the issue recognize that the Stevens dissent does not support an individual right [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/District_of_Columbia_v._Heller...

[1] https://reason.com/blog/2010/06/28/justice-john-paul-stevens...

[hga]

What you quoted from Wikipedia does not support your contention, nor what the Reason article quoted from Stevens' dissent. You might be right, but we'd have to read the whole dissent and we obviously interpret these words slightly differently. Certainly Stevens does not believe in the standard individual right interpretation of the 2nd Amendment, but he's also not shown to accept the conventional "collective right" interpretation, a logical nullity that cuts against every other use in the Bill of Rights, except as stare dicesis, and the latter is telling unless contradicted by something more specific.

Or to restate, it is my understanding that the dissents accept an "individual right" interpretation in some abstract sense before interpreting the whole as meaning nothing for individuals. Which I'll admit is a fine distinction, but this is from the group that finds a right to what they claim is privacy from the "penumbras" and "emanations" of explicit constitutional rights. So making find distinctions like I think I'm seeing, which don't really make any sense anyway is par for the course.

[ScottBurson]

> What you quoted from Wikipedia does not support your contention

Specifically why not? It seems pretty clear to me. Let's take it point by point.

() the Founders would have made the individual right aspect of the Second Amendment express if that was what was intended

Isn't that pretty clearly an argument that it's not an individual right? I'm sure you disagree with it; I'm sure you think that the individual right aspect is clearly expressed; but given the militia clause and the use of the collective term "the people", someone else might not read it that way. I'm not asking whether you agree with the reading, I'm asking whether you can see that, given that reading, the fact that the framers chose this wording is an argument that they didn't intend an individual right. If not, why not?

() that the "militia" preamble and exact phrase "to keep and bear arms" demands the conclusion that the Second Amendment touches on state militia service only

This seems pretty clear too.

I'll skip the next two points and come to this:

() The dissent concludes, "The Court would have us believe that over 200 years ago, the Framers made a choice to limit the tools available to elected officials wishing to regulate civilian uses of weapons.... I could not possibly conclude that the Framers made such a choice."

Again, I understand that you think that is exactly the choice the Framers made. Does this very point not show you the depth of the disagreement here?

As for the Reason article, again you claim it does not support my contention. And again, I ask you to explain. The author, Damon Root, senior editor of Reason, clearly thinks it does; see the second sentence.

Look, I don't always have a lot of respect for the Justices either. I think Scalia is an arrogant windbag, and don't even get me started on Thomas. But I would never go around thinking that they don't actually disagree with me.