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ELB wrote:

Purplehood wrote:I took two things away from the brief read that I made:

- Sotomayor dissented. She now is batting 0-1 in my book. Put me on record.
- There seemed to my uneducated mind to be too many references to the Handgun as the weapon of choice for self-defense. This alarms me. Could it possibly lead to limitations on long guns?
It particularly struck me as wrong as it made reference to Americans in general and by implication throughout our history as preferring them. Yet in reality the use of handguns has only become popular in US culture with the advent of revolvers and then semi-automatics. Prior to that the long gun appeared to be the most common weapon.
Am I reading too much into this?

I read it this way: both Heller and McDonald lawsuits dealt directly with handguns, so the SCOTUS directly addressed handguns. To get to that, they had to decide if the 2A protected the right to self-defense if the individual (not just the right to have a gun for militia duty). The answer was "YES" in both cases - at both federal and state levels. So if the right to self-defense is fundamental, what is the most popular tool for that. Handgun.

Long guns, hi-cap magazines, and all that will still have be hammered out, in some jurisdictions at least, but the foundation is set. The 2A protects a fundamental right that can't be legislated away just because the legislature feels like it, and self-defense in particular is part of that protected fundamental right.