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Although I greatly admire Thomas as probably the best defender and advocate in the current Court that the Constitution must be the basis for SCOTUS decisions, I’m somewhat surprised by what I read in his dissents here about the intended scope fourteenth amendment.

He seems to be defending Washington’s opinion in Corfield v. Coryell, an opinion that Judge Robert Bork called “a singularly confused opinion in 1823 by a single Justice of the Supreme Court setting out his ideas of what the original privileges and immunities clause of article IV of the Constitution meant” (Bork, The Tempting of America, pg 181).

Bork summarizing the issue of the fourteenth amendment, says that according to Justice Miller in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the “fourteenth amendment thus has little reach beyond the protection of those who had been slaves” (id, pg37). “In a word, the history of the fourteenth amendment gave judges no guidance on any subject other than the protection of blacks” (id., pg38).

I agree with the understanding of the Tenth Amendment, that there are all kinds of rights and liberties not mentioned in the Constitution because they don’t have to be mentioned. The so-called “Bill of Rights” mentioned some of them because the anti-federalists threatened to block ratification of the Constitution without listing some of them. But it is simply a sampling of pre-existing rights among many that are not mentioned. Again, the persuasive authority of the Constitution is the assertion in the Declaration of Independence that individuals are born “with certain unalienable rights, that among them are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” The default of right is with the states and the people, not with the feds.

So, I deny the feds have no true constitutional power to enforce the first ten amendments which includes no federal power to regulate individuals’ ownership of firearms unless the ownership threatens some other Constitutional provision (ex. violating the exclusive right of the feds to raise an army and declare war by raising a personal or state army and declaring war).

This should encourage you. The greatest threat to gun ownership isn't the states by a long shot. It's the feds. And as with so many other things, the feds are meddling in things they have no right nor power to meddle in.

He seems to be defending Washington’s opinion in Corfield v. Coryell, an opinion that Judge Robert Bork called “a singularly confused opinion in 1823 by a single Justice of the Supreme Court setting out his ideas of what the original privileges and immunities clause of article IV of the Constitution meant”

What Robert Bork thinks of Corfield does not matter in interpreting the original meaning of the 14th Amendment. What matters is what the framers of the 14th thought of Corfield. As Thomas points out in Saenz v Roe =>

Justice Washington’s opinion in Corfield indisputably influenced the Members of Congress who enacted the Fourteenth Amendment. When Congress gathered to debate the Fourteenth Amendment, members frequently, if not as a matter of course, appealed to Corfield, arguing that the Amendment was necessary to guarantee the fundamental rights that Justice Washington identified in his opinion.