The solicitor made the point that some restrictions are reasonable and that the standard the SCOTUS applies needs to be more precise than the one applied by the appeals court.
Now, I'm not going to say you are necessarily wrong about the first one, but I am saying you are wrong to interpret the solicitor's opinion as de facto favoring Brady, the AWB, and that you are wrong to beat up on W so brutally for this.
There are some real restrictions on the first amendment. Real ones that existed from the begining of time that are not mentioned in the amendment - like slander, liable, fighting words, immiment danger, etc. Are there no restrictions on the most literal interpretation of the 2nd amendment?
If we were to drag the 1st Amendment into the discussion (which is off topic BTW) it should be pointed out that Slander and Liable and Defamation all are tortous, merely owning a firearm is not, it is neutral object that does nothing unless utilized.
To reach for an analogy your position would have mere written words declared illegal to write even in the privacy of ones own home, they would be mala in se, just like the fruit of the 2nd amendment is with 20,000 firearms laws.
Pass “laws” that make twenty thousand words illegal write, and then we may have a “level” playing field for the discussion.
And I did not “savage” gwB over this, not at all.
Congress passing a law is not due process. Sure a court could impose a restriction as part of the individual sentence of someone convicted of particularly heinous felony, but Congress can't pass a law that says all those convicted of crimes punishable by more than one year, or two years if the conviction is a state one, are forever banned from owning arms. But they have done just that, in 1968 and earlier in a slightly different form in 1938. Notice that's "punishable" not "punished", so if the jury or judge thought there were extenuating circumstances and cut the sentence to something much less than that, or to "time served", the person still loses their RKBA forever.
The restrictions on the 1st Amendment that you cite are in the nature of punishment (either civil or criminal liability) for the violation of the rights of others. They are absolutely NOT in the nature of prior restraint. The DOJ wants to maintain the power of the government to restrict/effectively ban certain weapons BEFORE a person even buys them. A perfect example is a post-5/19/1986 full auto firearm: you and I simply cannot buy them. That you could buy an otherwise identical firearm that was registered on 5/19/86 shows the clear intent of the law: to drive up prices so that only wealthy collectors could afford full autos, and to make sure that the number of them is limited.
The 1st Amendment equivalent of such prior restraint would be the forced removal of your tongue prior to entering a movie house, on the theory that you might yell "fire!" when, in fact, there was no such fire, and thereby criminally endanger others.
I guess that I must have grown up in a different country, one in which law-abiding citizens were assumed not to be criminals, and were not prohibited from exercising their most basic right because some control freaks with power think that they MIGHT commit a crime with a firearm.