As I'm sure most of you know the Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments in the McDonald v. City of Chicago case sometime after the first of the year. The initial thrust will be to overturn Chicagos universal handgun ban.
The reason for this case is the Supreme Court has not as of yet applied the Second Amendment to the states due to a 200 year old decision that the Bill of Rights only applies directly to the federal Government. Yes this is bizarre and is the underlying reason states have been able to adopt whatever firearms restriction they wanted!
The 14th Amendment which says states may not "abrige the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States or deprive any person of life,liberty,or property without due process of the law".
The Supreme Court subsequently ruled that the priviledge of immunity clause only protected those "privileges and immunities" that owe their existence to the Constitution and by that reasoning the clause couldn't apply to the Bill of Rights.
However the Court found a way to protect the Bill of Rights under the 14th Amendment clause.
The way to settle this in other other areas has been to use the following process. The process is called"incorporation" based upon the idea that the provisions of the Bill of Rights are now incorporated into the Due Process clause.
The Court is being asked by the plaintiffs to apply the 2nd Amendment thru the "priviliges and Immunities" clause as it has in other areas.
If this doesn't get approved by the Supreme Court it will open the door for states to adopt even more restrictive legislation.
Losing this case would be an unmitigated disaster for all firearms owners and for our freedoms in general.
I've had to read the material published in the current issue of American Rifleman over multiple times to make sense of this as a layman.
This is my understanding of the crux of this matter and if we have any lawyers on this forum that can further clarify this issue I hope you will take the time to do so.
Jim
