Foie Gras banned in Chicago, Trans-Fats banned in New York and Washington D.C. banned guns in private homes.

Foie Gras and trans-fat bans are fairly recent but prohibition on handguns are not new as D.C. enacted it’s law in 1975 and Chicago passed a handgun ban in the early 80s.

This is the “slow creep” of Socialism and infringement of the U.S. Constitution. Of course, Liberals have deep conflicts with “originalists” and interpretation of the Constitution and the meaning America’s Founding Fathers had when writing the Second Amendment to the Constitution.

Today, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in the case of Heller v. District of Columbia, a suit brought by several Washington D.C. citizens contending that the ban on the possession of operable firearms inside one’s home violates the Second Amendment. The Circuit Court of Appeals for Washington D.C. agreed and held the ban to be unconstitutional.

Randy Barnett professor of constitutional law at the Georgetown Law Center writes:

Critics of originalism deny that we should be ruled by the “dead hand of the past.” They prefer following Supreme Court precedents that may or may not be consistent with original meaning. Any justice who today professes a commitment to originalism is branded a radical.

We contend that “radical” justices are “activist” justices who wish to rewrite the Constitution with their own beliefs and Liberal prejudices. Challengers of the D.C. law contend that the original meaning of the Second Amendment protects an individual “right to keep and bear arms” that “shall not be infringed.”

Opposition to the Second Amendment contend instead that, because the original intention of the Framers of the Second Amendment was to protect the continued existence of “a well regulated militia,” the right it protects was limited to the militia context.

Professor Barnett continues:

In the 1960s, gun control advocates dismissed the Second Amendment as protecting the so-called “collective right” of states to preserve their militias — notwithstanding that, everywhere else in the Constitution, a “right” of “the people” refers to an individual right of persons, and the 10th Amendment expressly distinguishes between “the people” and “the states.”

Professor Barnett concludes that Heller will have little effect on current law:

Because the District of Columbia is a federal entity, Heller provides a clean application of the Second Amendment which, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, originally applied only to the federal government. Before a state or municipal gun law can be challenged, the Supreme Court will have to decide that the right to keep and bear arms is also protected by the 14th Amendment, which limits state powers.

Those who wrote the amendment were concerned about enabling black freeman and white Republicans in the South to protect themselves from violence, including terrorism by local militias.

Should the Fourteenth Amendment supercede the Second Amendment or somehow not protect all individuals to legally possess firearms?

Heller involves a complete ban on operable firearms in the home. No state has a comparable law. And under current Supreme Court doctrine, even the First Amendment rights of speech and assembly are subject to reasonable time, place, and manner regulations. So too would be gun rights.

But although the implications of striking down the D.C. gun ban are limited, a decision upholding an unqualified individual right in Heller would still be a significant victory for individual rights and constitutionalism. To shrink from enforcing a clear mandate of the Constitution — as, sadly, the Supreme Court has often done in the past — would create a new precedent that would be far more dangerous to liberty than any weapon in the hands of a citizen.

Indeed!