We Won!

We Won!

Justice Scalia wrote the decision in Heller. It was a 5-4 decision, but they ruled:

1. The Second Amendment protects an individual right, not tied to or limited to militia duty.

2. It protects handguns and other weapons "in common use."

I will be reading through the decision in more detail over the next few hours, and updating this as I go along.

UPDATE: With respect to the meaning of "bear arms," footnotes 7 and 9 use a number of items that appear in the Georgetown Journal of Law and Public Policy paper by Joe Olson and myself that, to my knowledge, no one else had found.

At p. 15, they cite our paper! Yahoo!

UPDATE 2: On p. 38 Scalia cites Johnson v. Tompkins (CC Pa. 1833), a case that, to my knowledge, our paper first brought into the RKBA discussion.

On pp. 43-44 Scalia discusses the Second Amendment and its connection to passage of the 14th Amendment!

On pp. 59-60, they use the evidence concerning the fire protection purpose of the 1783 Massachusetts statute concerning loaded firearms.