Woohoo!!  This is a win for all Americans today, Republican and Democrat, conservative and liberal.  The Second Amendment does indeed guarantee an individual right to own a gun.

WASHINGTON (CNN) — The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Washington D.C.’s sweeping ban on handguns is unconstitutional.

The justices voted 5-4 against the ban with Justice Antonin Scalia writing the opinion for the majority.

At issue in District of Columbia v. Heller was whether the city’s ban violated the Second Amendment right to “keep and bear arms” by preventing individuals — as opposed to state militias — from having guns in their homes.

District of Columbia officials argued they had the responsibility to impose “reasonable” weapons restrictions to reduce violent crime, but several Washingtonians challenged the 32-year-old law. Some said they had been constant victims of crimes and needed guns for protection.

CNN

The decision being a 5 to 4 split though does bother me.  It shouldn’t have been that close.  We were one judge away from having the Second Amendment being totally gutted.  They should have been unanimous on this.  Anyone can clearly see what the intention of the Second Amendment was.  It’s not difficult.

Update:  I found some of the opinions of the dissenting justices.  Get a load of this crap:

In a dissent he summarized from the bench, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that the majority “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.”

He said such evidence “is nowhere to be found.”

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote a separate dissent in which he said, “In my view, there simply is no untouchable constitutional right guaranteed by the Second Amendment to keep loaded handguns in the house in crime-ridden urban areas.”

Fox News

Georgians are leading the way in holding up 2nd Amendment rights.

Georgians with carry licenses can tote their concealed guns on public transportation, in restaurants that serve alcohol and in state parks under legislation signed by Gov. Sonny Perdue Wednesday.

This issue is definitely heading to the courts. The anti-gun nuts can’t resist.

PITTSBURGH-David Harris, University of Pittsburgh professor of law and a leading national authority on racial profiling, calls the Second Amendment case on whether the District of Columbia can ban handguns that is to be argued before the U.S. Supreme Court tomorrow “one of the blockbuster cases of the term.” Harris says this is the first time the Supreme Court will talk about the Second Amendment “right to bear arms” since the 1930s.

According to Harris, the court must decide whether the Second Amendment espouses a collective or an individual right. He says that among the possible outcomes is a decision by the court that the amendment is completely individual, which could throw out all gun regulation; or, on the other hand, the court could rule that the amendment is collective, allowing states and the federal government to regulate guns as much as they wish.

Another interesting wrinkle, says Harris, is the split in the Bush Administration over the case. The solicitor general, Paul D. Clement, who speaks for the administration before the Supreme Court, thinks the case should be sent back to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, while Vice President Dick Cheney feels the Court of Appeals made the right decision.

In the end, Harris believes the Supreme Court will take a middle position and say that “the right to bear arms is an individual right, but some amount of reasonable regulation by the states and federal government is allowed.”

The University of Pittsburgh

There is no doubt that this is going to be a landmark case and I am very interested to see how the justices split on this, if at all.  I personally believe that if you really sit back and look at the entire picture it’s absurd to believe that an Originalist view of the Second Amendment does not guarantee that firearm ownership is an individual right.  Everyone owned a gun in colonial days and we had the British  at our front door ready to break the thing down and charge in with guns a blazing.  If the justices are truly interprating the Constitution as the Founders intended then it should be a 9 to 0 ruling in favor of an individual right to bear arms.  Of course, I realize that will not be the case.  Ideology rather than Constitutional law has taken precedent in many of the court’s cases over the past several years.

Something that Harris does not mention in his piece is the belief espoused by some that the Second Amendment prohibits the Federal government from enacting firearm restrictive legislation, but that it does not apply to the states or local governments.  In other words, the United States Senate can’t ban firearms on the whole country, but the State of New York could within its borders if it so decided.  I have always been of the understanding that the U.S. Constitution trumps any State Constitution or local ordinance, but perhaps not.  The Supreme Court could rule in some variation of this idea, particularly when you take into consideration that Washington D.C. is not a state, but a district of the Federal government and may theoretically exist outside the boundaries of restrictions placed on the Feds by the U.S. Constitution.

In any case, I do believe that Harris’s conclusion is likely to be the outcome, that the Second Amendment protects an individual right, but common sense restrictions may be applied in some manner by the Federal government or states or both.  Should that be the case, does that really solve the issue at hand?  What is considered to be a reasonable restriction?  Currently in D.C. a shot gun may be kept in the house but it has to be unloaded and fixed with a trigger lock (rendering it completely useless in an emergency).  I don’t consider this a reasonable restriction, so if Harris is correct, we will still be asking ourselves what is to become of the D.C. gun ban at the end of this week?

DE KALB, Ill (CBS) ― Several people have been shot on the Northern Illinois University campus. The suspect killed himself and officials say the danger has passed.

Officials confirmed that several people were shot at Cole Hall, a large lecture hall on campus, shortly after 3 p.m. and the campus was immediately placed on lockdown.

A spokeswoman for Kishwaukee Hospital reported that 17 people were being treated at the hospital. Three of those victims were critically injured, two with head wounds, one with a chest wound. One of those victims was airlifted to OSF St. Anthony Medical Center in Rockford.

Another eight victims were in serious condition with various injuries and six others were in good condition. Kishwaukee Hospital was not reporting any fatalities and did not expect to receive any further victims from the shooting.

CBS 2 Chicago

It just boggles the mind how another mass shooting could take place when no guns are allowed on campus. We don’t need them because the campus police are there to protect you.

A lot of Americans who believe in the right to own guns were very disappointed this weekend. On Friday, the Bush administration’s Justice Department entered into the fray over the District of Columbia’s 1976 handgun ban by filing a brief to the Supreme Court that effectively supports the ban. The administration pays lip service to the notion that the Second Amendment protects gun ownership as an “individual right,” but their brief leaves the term essentially meaningless.Quotes by the two sides’ lawyers say it all. The District’s acting attorney general, Peter Nickles, happily noted that the Justice Department’s brief was a “somewhat surprising and very favorable development.” Alan Gura, the attorney who will be representing those challenging the ban before the Supreme Court, accused the Bush administration of “basically siding with the District of Columbia” and said that “This is definitely hostile to our position.” As the lead to an article in the Los Angeles Times said Sunday, “gun-control advocates never expected to get a boost from the Bush administration.”As probably the most prominent Second Amendment law professor in the country privately confided in me, “If the Supreme Court accepts the solicitor general’s interpretation, the chances of getting the D.C. gun ban struck down are bleak.”

National Review

Bush is like Mr. Magoo creating a disaster to everyone around him. This ruling will be one of the most landmark cases in our nation’s history. It will basically determine what the Second Amendment means and Bush is siding with the gun control advocates. But the damage may not be contained to the just Second Amendment.

The biggest problem is the standard used for evaluating the constitutionality of regulations. The DOJ is asking that a different, much weaker standard be used for the Second Amendment than the courts demands for other “individual rights” such as speech, unreasonable searches and seizures, imprisonment without trial, and drawing and quartering people.

If one accepts the notion that gun ownership is an individual right, what does “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed” mean? What would the drafters of the Bill of Rights have had to write if they really meant the right “shall not be infringed”? Does the phrase “the right of the people” provide a different level of protection in the Second Amendment than in the First and Fourth?

But the total elimination of gun control is not under consideration by the Supreme Court. The question is what constitutes “reasonable” regulation. The DOJ brief argues that if the DC government says gun control is important for public safety, it should be allowed by the courts. What the appeals court argued is that gun regulations not only need to be reasonable, they need to withstand “strict scrutiny” — a test that ensures the regulations are narrowly tailored to achieve the desired goal.

Perhaps the Justice Department’s position isn’t too surprising. Like any other government agency, it has a hard time giving up its authority. The Justice Department’s bias can been seen in that it finds it necessary to raise the specter of machine guns 10 times when evaluating a law that bans handguns. Nor does the brief even acknowledge that after the ban, D.C.’s murder rate only once fell below what it was in 1976.

Worried about the possibility that a Supreme Court decision supporting the Second Amendment as an individual right could “cast doubt on the constitutionality of existing federal legislation,” the Department of Justice felt it necessary to head off any restrictions on government power right at the beginning.

So there you have it. The real man behind the mask. Bush screwed us on fiscal policy.  He’s screwed us on protecting our nation’s borders.  He’s screwed us on foreign policy and now he is snipping the very roots of our Constitutional rights. It is the Second Amendment that allows all others to be enforced.

Bush is no different than his predecessor. Both Bush and Clinton lie and use people for what they want. Bush used evangelicals to get reelected in 2004 with his pandering marriage amendment and those of the eight states that had their own on the ballots. As we see now, he also used Second Amendment supporters and gun control advocates are gleaming over it.

You very rarely hear the Democrats campaigning on gun control and the reason for that is because it is a politically poisonous issue for them. Many southern Democrat voters and those in rural areas are strong gun rights supporters and an anti-gun policy would isolate them from the party and the Democrats would lose many of their votes. Thankfully for them, Bush has just opened the door for that. Since Bush has now said that restrictions like D.C.’s are acceptable, look for more to pop up.

I have truly begun to question in the past year whether or not we made the right choice in reelecting this man in 2004. I can’t help to wonder that we may have been better off electing Kerry and watching him fall flat on his face, giving us a chance to put in a real Republican in 2008. I bet we’d still have Congress too.

Lott nailed the reason for this right on the head too. It’s all about keeping the power.

Yes, you read that headline right, it’s true:

The news broke late last night that the Department of Justice has filed an amicus brief in the DC Gun Ban case, asking that the Supreme Court overturn the Court of Appeals decision striking down the DC Gun Ban. This is a move of breathtaking idiocy that may have already cost us the election.

Bill Quick responds in his typical take-no-prisoners approach:

We have the first chance in almost eight decades to see the Second finally, legally established an an individual right (and all that potentially entails for liberty) and the farking George W. Bush compassionate conservative administration steps in and stabs us in the back!!!.

This is the same GWB who some time ago announced he would sign a renewal of the assault weapons ban if such landed on his desk.

I’ve had it. We simply can’t trust these bastards. Bush is, of course, a long-established disgrace to the conservative wing of the GOP, and is, in fact, no conservative at all. He is, in fact, of the same ilk as John McCain, Mike Huckabee, and Rudy Giuliani, so if any of these men are elected and later damage the cause of conservatism in the US, conservative voters have only themselves to blame, as I blame myself for voting for GWB, even when it was obvious what he was (no conservative) to those who cared to actually look at his record and his own statements.

I think Mr. Quick sized up the situation well. The Washington, D.C. handgun ban was struck down by an appeals court last March, in a striking victory for citizens. The Supreme Court has chosen to hear the case, meaning either the justices are thinking of either overturning the appeals court or, more likely, setting a firm pro-gun rights precedent by upholding it. It will come down to what side of the bed Justice Anthony Kennedy wakes up on that morning.

This is another sad departure from conservatism from the Bush Administration, and is sure to tick plenty of people off. Conservative voters need to be mindful of this when choosing their Presidential nominee. You know where I stand, and here’s what Fred has to say on the 2nd Amendment:

I strongly support the Second Amendment of the Constitution, which protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms. Gun control is touted as a major crime-control measure. But some of the places with the strictest gun-control laws also have high violent-crime rates. Disarming law-abiding citizens does not prevent crime. The answer to violent crime is smart, effective, and aggressive law enforcement. The real effect of these gun-control measures is to place onerous restrictions on law-abiding citizens who use firearms for such legal activities as self-defense, sport-shooting, hunting, and collecting. I am committed to:

• Strictly enforcing existing laws and severely punishing violent criminals.
• Protecting the rights individual Americans enjoy under the Second Amendment.

By the way, even the New York Times is starting to note what blogs have been saying for days, that Thompson’s debate in the most recent debate was electric and having real effects on South Carolina voters, most of whom were undecided before the debate.

With the upcoming DC gun ban case to be heard by the Supreme Court, Fred Thompson put up a statement concerning his view of the Second Amendment and the absurdity of this case.  He is spot on in his analysis.

College students across the country have been strapping empty holsters around their waists this week to protest laws that prohibit concealed weapons on campus, citing concerns over campus shootings.”People who would otherwise be able to defend themselves are left defenseless when on campus,” said Ethan Bratt, a graduate student wearing an empty holster this week on the campus of Seattle Pacific University.

Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, a group of college students, parents and citizens who organized after the deadly shootings at Virginia Tech University in April, launched the protest.

Fox News

I have been hearing this debated more and more lately and it’s becoming a contentious issue. Some argue that if college students are able to carry that campuses will turn into a bonanza. This claim is of course without any merit because the State of Utah has allowed concealed carry on campuses for years and they have not had a single incident. Then you have people like Tracy Schario from GW:

“We do not allow weapons on campus for the safety and security of our student body and faculty,”

Her position, while well intentioned, is simply illogical. Virginia Tech had the same policy as did all the other schools that have had incidents of shootings. It’s the same ridiculous argument that gun grabbing advocates make in terms of making the entire population gun free and “more safe.” The bad guys don’t follow the rules and the victims are left defenseless. A year or two ago there was a series of muggings on the University of Pittsburgh campus, one in which a student was beaten pretty badly. Would that have still happened if the would be attackers knew that conceal carry was permitted on the Pitt campus?

The Second Amendment rights of college students all across the country have been violated for a long time and it’s become rather clear in recent years that they are sitting ducks when they are at school. If students at Virginia Tech had been able to carry a gun 32 more of them might still be alive.