You Can Take My Gun When You Pry It . . . .

Every once in a great while, the U.S. Supreme Court gets one right, and spectacularly so. I've been a sometime student of Second Amendment law for about 15 years, so it was nice to see this decision come a few weeks ago after so many years of waiting. It may have been another 5-4 vote, but at least it's finally official -- the Second Amendment protects an INDIVIDUAL'S right to "keep and bear arms" for self defense, not merely members of the National Guard. This is a really big, historically significant event. And Justice Scalia's opinion is so thorough and well reasoned that it's likely to stand as the definitive analysis of the question for decades to come.

It's impossible to do justice to the 64-page majority opinion in a blog post (though the whole think is really worth reading even for those generally unfamiliar with the U.S. court system), but I'll attempt to give at least a brief summary of the main argument:

Pro-gunners: The Second Amendment says the people need to be armed so that the militia, which traditionally included all able-bodied men between 18 and 45, can be called upon to resist tyranny and invasion.

Anti-gunners: No, the Second Amendment protects the collective right of the people to defend itself through the National Guard only. If you're not in the guard, the Second Amendment offers no protection whatsoever for gun owners as such. And in any case, when the Second Amendment was written, "guns" were single-shot muskets; now that the world is so different the Second Amendment is a historical irrelevance.

Pro-gunners: We have all the scholarship and history on our side, but more importantly we have five votes and you only have four. We win!

It's difficult to pick colorful excerpts from constitutional law opinions that don't seem out of context, but Justice Scalia came through for us:

Besides ignoring the historical reality that the Second Amendment was not intended to lay down a "novel principl[e]" but rather codified a right "inherited from our English ancestors," . . . [the anti-gunners'] interpretation does not even achieve the narrower purpose that prompted codification of the right. If, as they believe, the Second Amendment right is no more than the right to keep and use weapons as a member of an organized militia, . . . if, that is, the organized militia is the sole institutional beneficiary of the Second Amendment's guarantee -- it does not assure the existence of a "citizens' militia" as a safeguard against tyranny. For Congress retains plenary authority to organize the militia, which must include the authority to say who will belong to the organized force. That is why the first Militia Act's requirement that only whites enroll caused States to amend their militia laws to exclude free blacks. . . . Thus, if [the anti-gunners] are correct, the Second Amendment protects citizens' right to use a gun in an organization from which Congress has plenary authority to exclude them. It guarantees a select militia of the sort the Stuart kings found useful, but not the people's militia that was the concern of the founding generation.

--slip op. at 27.

And so falls the District of Columbia's handgun band at long last.