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Originally Posted by Tom Servo
In a way, Scalia and Alito did a good job of boxing them in for the foreseeable future. The court can't go reversing its own decisions within a short time-frame without damaging their credibility.
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I think Alito did a much better job in
McDonald than Scalia did in
Heller, and I continue to [want to] believe that Scalia wrote the
Heller decision as he did in order to keep the fifth vote on the side of the good guys (s). But Scalia did NOT make it clear that the 2nd Amendment protects one, single, unified, two-pronged right to both keep
AND bear arms, thus leaving the antis to continue the ridiculous charade that the 2nd Amendment protects ONLY a right to keep a firearm in the home, and that the 2A has nothing to do with self-defense out on the street. (Or even in your own front yard.)
The other place where Scalia screwed the pooch was with the fuzzy language abut "presumptively" lawful restrictions [which is to say, "infringements"] on the RKBA. What this really meant was "There are a lot of gun regulations around the country that are not part of this case, so we're not going to address them today. Until challenged in court, we'll
presume that they're okay."
But the grabbers, like Ms. Feinstein, take that as
carte blanche to write any sort of nonsense they want, preface with "reasonable" (even though it isn't reasonable), and run with it. And what Scalia wrote ignores the plain language of the 2nd Amendment itself, which does NOT admit any sort of regulations, reasonable or unreasonable.
This is exactly what the Congress has done with the commerce clause. The Constitution reserves to the Feds the authority to regulate interstate commerce. So every stupid new law they pass in Washington now begins by declaring that ___ affects interstate commerce, therefore ___.
I was disappointed in Scalia's decision. I think he could -- and should -- have done better, but it is what it is. And it did settle (at least for the immediate future) the issue of whether the RKBA is an individual right or a collective right. And that alone was vitally important. That provided a very good foundation for Alito in [u]McDonald[/i].