“To the contrary, the Second Amendment, properly construed, allows for reasonable regulation of firearms”
Here is where the Bush administration’s argument falls down. Let’s define reasonable. Does reasonable restrictions mean that one cannot own a handgun in DC and if one owns a rifle in DC it must be broken down and rendered unusable. I would think that in any normal persons thinking, this is very unreasonable to completely ban a set of firearms and render another set of firearms unusable.
Reasonable restrictions are not allowing convicted felons or people who are deemed physcho or minors to be able to own firearms. Unreasonable restrictions is to ban working firearms from everyone in the city!!
Another unreasonable restriction is to ban a whole category of arms, like modern machine guns, and so-called assault weapons.
The long and the short of it is whether we will continue to tolerate a too intrusive government, from any level, in our daily lives.
The answer, I fear, is yes. And we will rue the day.
There is no ambiguity in the Second Amendment. It is plain, succinct, and logical. Restrictions on felons and mentally incompetent persons, may be within the constraints of reasonable, but there is no provision for ‘reasonsble’ constraints in the text. Does that open a can of worms for many folks? Probably.
The argument often used is that common sense restrictions on the Second Amendment are not unlike the “yelling fire in a crowded theater” argument applied to the First Amendment. I’m not sure I fully agree with that notion, at this point, but I’m open to further discussion.
However, the restriction on machine guns is, IMO, unconstitutional, despite being upheld over the years since it’s creation in the late 1930’s.
There’s an argument elsewhere in this thread that alludes to nuclear weapons. Explosive devices are not generally considered to be firearms, which is the subject of this action.
The City fathers recognize that the average person who just mortgaged their home to pay their property taxes is liable to flip out when she/he sees a city politician having lunch or dinner at a fine restaurant on the public tab. They don’t want to be stuck with writing all the reports and going to the investigation committee meetings. You can understand that, can’t you?