Infinite Arrogance Redux

Once again, David Hardy's Arms & the Law blog gets the hat-tip for more proof of the chasm that exists between the elites in our country and the rest of us.

Last time, it was FBI Director Robert Mueller.

This time, it's Judge Richard Posner of the Federal Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most influential Federal judges in legal circles, and his take on Heller.

Read the whole thing, but this excerpt will give you the flavor:

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...Politically conscious Americans in the late eighteenth century feared standing armies, having fought the British army in the Revolution, and feared centralized government (as in Britain); and on both counts they wanted to make sure that the states would be allowed to have armed militias. The federal government could regulate them but not disarm them. The fear was that in the absence of such a provision in the Bill of Rights, the provision in Article I of the Constitution authorizing Congress to organize, arm, discipline, and call into service "the Militia" (a term that embraces the state militias, because the same provision reserves the right to train and officer "the Militia" to the respective states) would enable Congress to disarm them. That fear surfaced in the debates over the ratification of the original Constitution and was, as Justice John Paul Stevens's dissenting opinion explains, the motivation for the Second Amendment.

The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense...
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And yes, boys and girls, the post-Heller litigation attacking Illinois' gun laws will come before the Seventh Circuit, if there are appeals.

Think Posner's alone amongst his 7th Circuit judicial comrades (as well as the rest of the Federal bench) in believing that natural rights, as explicitly enumerated in the Constitution, should be subject to local majority rule?

See this excerpt from page 3 of the article:

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...Heller gives short shrift to the values of federalism, and to the related values of cultural diversity, local preference, and social experimentation. A majority of Americans support gun rights. But if the District of Columbia (or Chicago or New York) wants to ban guns, why should the views of a national majority control? Is that democracy, or is it Rousseau's forced conformity to the "general will"? True, a member of a national majority can be a member of a minority within a local area: gun buffs in Washington, D.C., for example. But a person who is a member of a local minority but a national majority can relocate to a part of the country in which the national majority rules. A resident of Washington can move to northern Virginia. This is not to say that there should be no national rights--that Mississippi should be permitted to stone adulterers, or Rhode Island to ban The Da Vinci Code. But the question of whether to nationalize an issue in the name of the Constitution calls for an exercise of judgment; and when the nation is deeply divided over an issue to which the Constitution does not speak with any clarity, and a uniform national policy would override differences in local conditions, nationalization may be premature...
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But Heller was a famous victory...

As long as the those wielding the hammer of Government power "do it to Julia" and the rest of the radical 'SNBI' extremists.

Tempus fugit.