Five to Four -- good news but just

I am still amazed that the Second Amendment almost failed the Supreme Court. The 2008 Heller decision proved that it applied to the District of Columbia. Today's decision reaffirms its application to States. From the Wall Street Journal:

Five Gun Salute
Judicial liberals have been discovering the virtues of legal precedent now that conservatives are finally winning a few cases at the Supreme Court, but in yesterday's major gun rights case that all went out the window. The four liberal Justices rejected a 2008 landmark precedent as well as one of their own bedrock Constitutional principles.

That's the most surprising news in yesterday's 5-4 decision in McDonald v. Chicago, which ruled that the Second Amendment protects the same Constitutional right in the states as it does in Washington, D.C. The decision is the logical extension of 2008's District of Columbia v. Heller, which ruled for the first time that the Second Amendment was an individual right like the rest of the Bill of Rights. In McDonald, the Justices established that this right also applies to the states via the Fourteenth Amendment and cast doubt on a Chicago ordinance banning handguns.

Most Court followers had expected the decision to "incorporate" the Second Amendment to the states to be relatively easy and perhaps draw a large majority. Over nearly a century of cases, the High Court has extended to the states most of the rest of the Bill of Rights including part or all of the First, Fourth, Fifth, Sixth and Eighth Amendments. It would be passing strange for the Second Amendment to be the lone outlier.

All the more so given that Justice Samuel Alito's plurality opinion used "substantive due process" under the Fourteenth Amendment to justify the decision. This is the logic that liberals have long used to apply the other Bill of Rights to the states, and objections to it have most often come from conservatives. Justice Antonin Scalia mentioned his own "misgivings about Substantive Due Process" as a matter of original Constitutional interpretation in his concurring opinion yesterday. But he said he "acquiesced" in this decision "'because it is both long established and narrowly limited.'"

The same story as reported by the Chicago Tribune:

Court took cheap shot at city's crime rate, Chicago officials contend
Many supporters of Chicago's handgun ban were braced for defeat Monday, but some were surprised the U.S. Supreme Court ruling took such sharp aim at the city's crime-fighting efforts.

The high court's decision made references to the city's high murder rate and suggested that citizens who feel they aren't being protected by police should be allowed to protect themselves.

A bit of background at FOX News:

Chicago mayor says spate of gun deaths proves city needs to keep handgun ban in place
Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley defended the city's handgun ban Tuesday after a spate of shootings that left 10 people dead and dozens wounded, saying the violence bolsters the city's argument that the 1982 ordinance is needed.

Daley said the city must continue to fight against handguns even if the U.S. Supreme Court strikes down the ban as unconstitional. The court is expected to rule later this month.

"Look at all the guns that shot people this weekend. Where did they come from? That is the issue," Daley said at a South Side high school Tuesday.

Ten people have been killed and more than 60 others wounded by gunfire since Friday, city officials said.

These mouth-breathers; these booger-eating morons utterly fail to grasp two very simple facts: #1) - gun laws do not affect the criminal, they only affect the honest citizen. #2) - if a criminal was not sure that his victim was not armed, they would be a lot less inclined to try to assault them. Robert Anson Heinlein said it best: "An armed society is a polite society."