DAVID HARDY HAS MORE on developments in Parker v. District of Columbia, the case in which the D.C. Circuit overturned the District’s gun ban on Second Amendment grounds.
And I just ran across these comments from Prof. Mike O’Shea at Concurring Opinions:
There has been extensive and lively discussion of Parker, yet I think the legal commentariat has not quite grasped how momentous a cert grant would be. It’s not often that the Supreme Court takes up the core meaning of an entire Amendment of the Bill of Rights, in a context where it writes on a mostly clean slate from the standpoint of prior holdings. If the Court takes the case, then October Term 2007 becomes The Second Amendment Term. Parker would swiftly overshadow, for example, the Court’s important recent cert grant in the Guantanamo cases.
How many Americans would view District of Columbia v. Parker as the most important court case of the last thirty years? The answer must run into seven figures. The decision would have far-reaching effects, particularly in the event of a reversal.
Here is one way to think about the message the Supreme Court would be sending if it reversed the D.C. Circuit on the merits in Parker . . . That’s a comparison between the Court’s handling of the enumerated rights claim at issue in Parker, and its demonstrated willingness to embrace even non-enumerated individual rights that are congenial to the political left, in cases like Roe and Lawrence. “So the Constitution says Roe, but it doesn’t say I have the right to keep a gun to defend my home, huh?”
Read the whole thing.