"Wes" wrote in message
...
"Ed Huntress" wrote:

Now, does it include a presumption of a pre-existing individual right?
That's one of the arguable points. If you check the original debates in
Congress over the Bill of Rights, you'll find NO MENTION whatever of any
other purpose for the 2nd Amendment except the right of the states to arm
and maintain their own militias.

One must consider that the right to bear arms was likely viewed the same
way
as the right to breath air. Is breathing in the Constitution? Can you
live
without doing so?

That's an argument, that the individual right was so readily assumed that it
didn't require iteration in a Bill of Rights. But that runs up against
conservative jurisprudence, which basically says that if the right isn't
spelled out, then it's up to Congress whether it should be treated as a
right under law. That's the position that Robert Bork and other
"originalists" take.

But the current group of "originalists" are, as they said about the virgin
in "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum," bum originalists.
That's good for the likelihood they'll find for an individual right. What
these Justices really are is liberal jurists who have a politically
conservative agenda. It makes for a pretty foul-smelling jurist, but it
might be enough to overturn a century of federal-court precedent and find
for the individual right.

BTW, someone commented that the weight of precedence is on the side of the
individual right. Not so. For example, exactly two Circuit Courts of Appeals
have found for an individual right, if you include the DC Circuit that
precipitated this case. In contrast, six (I think) Circuit Courts have found
for a collective right. The rest of the 13 haven't had a decisive case on
the issue.

--
Ed Huntress