The Most Liberal Court in the land finally says something that makes sense (Sorta)

Excerpts of the 9th Circuit ruling follow:

To summarize, our task is to determine whether the right to keep and bear arms ranks as fundamental, meaning "necessary to an Anglo-American regime of ordered liberty." Duncan, 391 U.S. at 149 n.14 (emphasis added). If it does, then the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates it. This culturally specific inquiry compels us to determine whether the right is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition."

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This brief survey of our history reveals a right indeed "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." Moreover, whereas the Supreme Court has previously incorporated rights the colonists fought for, we have here both a right they fought for and the right that allowed them to fight.

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We also note that the target of the right to keep and bear arms shifted in the period leading up to the Civil War. While the generation of 1789 envisioned the right as a component of local resistance to centralized tyranny, whether British or federal, the generation of 1868 envisioned the right as safeguard to protect individuals from oppressive or indifferent local governments. See Amar, supra, at 257-66. But though the source of the threat may have migrated, the antidote remained the same: the individual right to keep and bear arms, a recourse for "when the sanctions of society and laws are found insufficient to restrain the violence of oppression." 1 Blackstone, supra, at *144.

We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition." Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right. It has long been regarded as the "true palladium of liberty." Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later. The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conceptionof ordered liberty that we have inherited.17 We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.