This is a good day for the law-abiding citizens of Washington D.C. and a good day for America:

Here’s the “wire” from the A.P. because…obviously if the “wire” doesn’t say it, it doesn’t happen.

Gun Ban in DC ruled Unconstitutional

The opening paragraph of the majority opinion summarizes the case:

District of Columbia law bans handgun possession by making it a crime to carry an unregistered firearm and prohibiting the registration of handguns; provides separately that no person may carry an unlicensed handgun, but authorizes the police chief to issue 1-year licenses; and requires residents to keep lawfully owned firearms unloaded and dissembled or bound by a trigger lock or similar device.

Respondent Heller, a D. C. special policeman, applied to register a handgun he wished to keep at home, but the District refused. He filed this suit seeking, on Second Amendment grounds, to enjoin the city from enforcing the bar on handgun registration, the licensing requirement insofar as it prohibits carrying an unlicensed firearm in the home, and the trigger-lock requirement insofar as it prohibits the use of functional firearms in the home. The District Court dismissed the suit, but the D. C. Circuit reversed, holding that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to possess firearms and that the city’s total ban on handguns, as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be kept nonfunctional even when necessary for self-defense, violated that right.

And here’s the summary of the Majority opinion:

1. 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.

(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.
(b) The prefatory clause comports with the Court’s interpretation of the operative clause. The “militia” comprised all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense. The Antifederalists feared that the Federal Government would disarm the people in order to disable this citizens’ militia, enabling a politicized standing army or a select militia to rule. The response was to deny Congress power to abridge the ancient right of individuals to keep and bear arms, so that the ideal of a citizens’ militia would be preserved.
(c) The Court’s interpretation is confirmed by analogous armsbearing rights in state constitutions that preceded and immediately followed the Second Amendment.
(d) The Second Amendment’s drafting history, while of dubious interpretive worth, reveals three state Second Amendment proposals that unequivocally referred to an individual right to bear arms.
(e) Interpretation of the Second Amendment by scholars, courts and legislators, from immediately after its ratification through the late 19th century also supports the Court’s conclusion.
(f) None of the Court’s precedents forecloses the Court’s interpretation. Neither United States v. Cruikshank, 92 U. S. 542, 553, nor Presser v. Illinois, 116 U. S. 252, 264–265, refutes the individualrights interpretation. United States v. Miller, 307 U. S. 174, does not limit the right to keep and bear arms to militia purposes, but rather limits the type of weapon to which the right applies to those used by the militia, i.e., those in common use for lawful purposes.

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. Miller’s holding that the sorts of weapons protected are those “in common use at the time” finds support in the historical tradition of prohibiting the carrying of dangerous and unusual weapons.

3. The handgun ban and the trigger-lock requirement (as applied to self-defense) violate the Second Amendment. The District’s total ban on handgun possession in the home amounts to a prohibition on an entire class of “arms” that Americans overwhelmingly choose for the lawful purpose of self-defense. Under any of the standards of scrutiny the Court has applied to enumerated constitutional rights, this prohibition—in the place where the importance of the lawful defense of self, family, and property is most acute—would fail constitutional muster. Similarly, the requirement that any lawful firearm in the home be disassembled or bound by a trigger lock makes it impossible for citizens to use arms for the core lawful purpose of self-defense and is hence unconstitutional. Because Heller conceded at oral argument that the D. C. licensing law is permissible if it is not enforced arbitrarily and capriciously, the Court assumes that a license will satisfy his prayer for relief and does not address the licensing requirement. Assuming he is not disqualified from exercising Second Amendment rights, the District must permit Heller to register his handgun and must issue him a license to carry it in the home.

478 F. 3d 370, affirmed.
SCALIA, J., delivered the opinion of the Court, in which ROBERTS, C. J., and KENNEDY, THOMAS, and ALITO, JJ., joined. STEVENS, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which SOUTER, GINSBURG, and BREYER, JJ., joined. BREYER, J., filed a dissenting opinion, in which STEVENS, SOUTER, and GINSBURG, JJ., joined.

More to come, I’m sure…

Now I can understand technically that this might be the first time in our nation’s history that the right to bear arms has been “embraced” (possibly) by the Supreme Court, but what is so new about the right to bear arms?

The reason it hasn’t been “embraced” by the Supreme Court is because it hasn’t needed to be. What’s SHOCKING is that it took this long for someone in the District to appeal this obvious constitutional infringement. Let’s take a look at it, shall we?

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Hmmm…what part of that is not clear? A well-regulated militia, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. First of all, there is a difference between a standing army and a militia, and even the National Guard fits the former definition better than the latter. A militia is by its definition ARMED individuals prepared to defend their community from whatever force it feels is infringing upon its community. For a Solicitor General to make this argument:

…Mr. Dellinger asserted that at the time the Second Amendment was drafted, “the people” and “the militia” were essentially synonymous; therefore, he said, the amendment, its two clauses properly interpreted, gave people the right to own weapons only in connection with their militia service….Mr. Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general, {stated} that the focus should be on “the scope and nature of the right that the people have.” He added, “It is a right to participate in the common defense.”

And how are people to participate in the common defense if they are unarmed? And what is “common”? The country? State? Neighborhood?

And what about the handgun violence in D.C. today? The Boston Globe calls it a mystery that the gun ban in DC hasn’t “accomplished everything that mayor and council of that era wanted it to.”

Really? But for a real groan, read this:

Justice Stephen G. Breyer, late in the argument, made an effort to save the statute by a similar historical analogy. Firearms were regulated in the country’s early years for the sake of safety, he noted, describing a Massachusetts law that prohibited keeping loaded weapons in the home because of the risk of fire. “So today, roughly, you can say no handguns in the city because of the risk of crime,” Justice Breyer said. “Things change.”

What? Risk of crime? So guns are at risk of just jumping up and committing crimes all on their own? I’m amazed at this twisted sort of logic. At least he didn’t cite “International Law.” If he did he might have done a little research on the UK gun ban in 1996-7.

If this case goes where I hope it’s going, this will be the most fortunate turn of events for the people of DC in decades.

Personally, I don’t like this at all. Just tick off a doctor or fail to pay your doctor’s bill and suddenly, you will lose a constitutional right. You may want to start asking your physician which party he belongs to before you visit that doctor.

Your doctor could put you on no-gun list
Congress fast-tracks plan to let physicians ban weapons ownership

The House of Representatives has fast-tracked new legislation to “improve” the National Instant Criminal Background Check System by allowing doctors to now decide who can own firearms.
The proposal, H.R. 2640, was sponsored by U.S. Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, D-N.Y., in the wake of the April tragedy at Virginia Tech, when a gunman shot and killed more than 30 people, then killed himself.
McCarthy, whose own husband was killed in a random shooting on a commuter train in New York City in 1993, introduced the “NICS Improvement Act,” which sailed through the House in three days.

http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=56311