Courts ponder the second amendment

[Strangler Lewis]

To say that it was originally intended to be in article I, section 9 does not say much. That section is not about individual rights. It's about preventing Congress from engaging in the types of overbearing abuses of power vis a vis the states that are catalogued in the dull part of the Declaration of Independence. This arguably suggests that part of the concern of the Second Amendment was ensuring that states could protect themselves against a tyrannous federal government.

However, unless you want to say that, as with most but not all of the Bill of Rights, the Second Amendment was incorporated through the Fourteenth Amendment (which limits state action) to apply to the states, then states would still have the right to regulate gun ownership. Since the District of Columbia is now self-governing, it should as well. Thus, while the federal police cannot break down our doors to confiscate our nuclear weapons, the state police can.

It would be a little ironic if the Court held that the Second Amendment applied to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment since that amendment was enacted in the aftermath of an armed secession.