Ban on guns with serial numbers removed is unconstitutional -U.S. judge

The constitution assumes the government will be run by bad people. Hence all the limits it imposed on government.

> Gun ownership is baked into our founding documentation (The Constitution); as such, it's part of the very premise of our governmental foundation.

The irony here is that this court strikes down a clause of the Gun Control Act 1968 on the grounds that it is "not consistent with the United States' 'historical tradition of firearm regulation'" – and yet the very Supreme Court precedents it is applying in doing so are themselves not consistent with that tradition.

The 2nd Amendment was only intended to be a limit on federal gun laws; its authors didn't intend it to apply to the states, and nobody at the time understood it as doing so. Whether and to what extent state and local governments could regulate gun ownership was seen as a matter for state constitutions and state courts, not something the federal government (in any of its three branches) should get involved in.

Then the 14th Amendment was enacted, to try to prevent the defeated Confederate states from oppressing the newly freed slaves. Nobody at the time thought it had any relevance to non-discriminatory gun laws. I think its framers would have supported its use to overturn racially discriminatory state or local gun laws, but they would have seen racially neutral gun regulation as outside its intended scope.

The idea that non-discriminatory state and local (as opposed to federal) gun laws can violate the combination of the 2nd and 14th Amendments was introduced by the Supreme Court in 2010 (McDonald v Chicago). There is no evidence that the original authors of either Amendment would have foresaw or expected that outcome, and so was a major deviation from the "the United States' 'historical tradition of firearm regulation'".

The Gun Control Act 1968 is of course a federal law, so overturning it is not prima facie inconsistent with the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment. However, the logic of the decision (and the precedents it is based on) apply equally to equivalent state and local gun laws and regulations, which is a radical deviation from the original intentions behind the 2nd and 14th Amendments.

Even if it were taken to mean regulate, in terms of rule setting, you still have to deal with the fact that the right is assigned to "the people", and not the state militias.

The unamended Constitution and the Bill of Rights use the phrase “right of the people” two other times, in the First Amendment’s Assembly-and-Petition Clause and in the Fourth Amendment’s Search-and-Seizure Clause.

These instances unambiguously refer to individual rights, not “collective” rights, or rights that may be exercised only through participation in some corporate body.

As the SCOTUS found in Heller, The Amendment’s prefatory clause announces a purpose, but does not limit or expand the scope of the second part, the operative clause. The operative clause’s text and history demonstrate that it connotes an individual right to keep and bear arms.

The Bill of Rights originally only applied to the federal government-which the opening words of the 1st Amendment - “Congress shall make no law…”-make very clear. Its authors modelled it on similar Bills of Rights in state constitutions - they believed that protecting the rights of citizens against infringement by the state and local governments was the job of state constitutions (to be enforced by state supreme courts) - not a federal issue. This was affirmed by the Supreme Court in the 1833 case Barron v Baltimore.

Then, the 14th Amendment was ratified. Its purpose was to prevent the ex-Confederate states from disenfranchising African-Americans. It was designed to overturn racially discriminatory state laws. There is no historical evidence its authors intended it to carte blanche apply the federal Bill of Rights to the states.

But, although the intention of the 14th Amendment in its historical context is quite clear, it was rather vaguely worded-and, in a gradual process, the Supreme Court began to exploit that vagueness in order to interpret the 14th Amendment as doing exactly that-“incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states”-something it has done piecemeal, article by article, clause by clause, and which still has not yet completed - the 1st Amendment was gradually incorporated from 1925 to 1963; the 2nd was only incorporated in 2010; by contrast, the 7th Amendment (right to jury trials in civil suits, etc) still has not been.

There is no evidence that the framers of the 14th Amendment ever intended the Supreme Court to engage in this rather arbitrary process of piecemeal “incorporation”-it is just something SCOTUS has made up out of whole cloth.

That's really interesting, and something I haven't read before. Thank you for the idea