2nd Amendment Incorporation: It's About Time!

First sighted at Say Uncle (and then everywhere else).

The second amendment is incorporated into the 14th amendment, via the due process clause. By the 9th circuit court, no less. Then, being the 9th circuit they went ahead and said cities can limit gun posession on a fairground for the same reason they can limit them in schools & other "sensitive places" (from the Heller decision).

The opinion is worth a read if you want to have an answer to the "collective rights" interpretation of the 2nd Amendment. All emphases are mine, and links are inserted by me. Full text can be read/downloaded here.

We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.” Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.” Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited. We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments

Footnote 18 says:

The County and its amici point out that, however universal its earlier support, the right to keep and bear arms has now become controversial. See generally Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale L.J. 637 (1989). But we do not measure the protection the Constitution affords a right by the values of our own times. If contemporary desuetude sufficed to read rights out of the Constitution, then there would be little benefit to a written statement of them. Some may disagree with the decision of the Founders to enshrine a given right in the Constitution. If so, then the people can amend the document. But such amendments are not for the courts to ordain.

Huh! They must have run out of weed long enough to be clear-headed during the writing of the first part of the decision. Then, of course, they scored some Maui Wowie and got right back to being the Ninth Circus:

If we apply these principles here, we conclude that although the Second Amendment, applied through the Due Process Clause, protects a right to keep and bear arms for individual self-defense, it does not contain an entitlement to bring guns onto government property.

and

Although Heller does not provide much guidance, the open, public spaces the County’s Ordinance covers fit comfortably within the same category as schools and government buildings.

You win some, you lose some. Sometimes in the same case. So now the defendants have lost and they (not the county) get to say when and how appeals are filed, and how far the case is pushed. This is hypothetically Good for us. It is possible that the supreme Court might overturn the verdict on appeal, but I give that only 60/40 odds. I do hope, now that SOMEBODY had the balls to raise the issue and standing was found, the supremes will hand down a once-and-for-all incorporation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms under the 14th Amendment for the whole country.

We'll see. Start praying now.