Supreme Court Limits Local Ability to Restrict
Guns Outside the Home
Amendment II United States Constitution
A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
That is one sentence, four clauses (as written) of one sentence. It must be read as one sentence. The right to bear arms is created in the context of the necessity of "A well regulated Militia..." to a "free State." So only militia members have the right created, not all fucking Joes on the street; explicitly, only "well regulated Militias". Implicitly, only State militias, that is extensions of the state (who else is to "regulate" them?). Updating to modern times a well regulated militia would include the police, it would include any body that the state deems "necessary to security" and which it "well regulates." A plausible reading of the whole is that private citizens designated by the state be a reserve force for the standing militia have the right to bear arms, but once again the state would "regulate", by designating, "the people" to comprise the reserves and it is an entirely unreasonable reading of the whole to say that each unregulated, undesignated individual citizen comprising "the people" has a right that "shall not be infringed" to bear arms. The "right of the people" is to join a state militia or equivalent, a police force, which shall be "well regulated" in all cases, in order to activate their right to bear arms. This is common reading of language. It is also "strict construction," not reading into or beyond the Framers' intent. But somehow guns rights advocates have convinced the courts that the third and fourth clauses alone define the right and that is not what the Second Amendment says. Per New York Times, in the case that came before SCOTUS in today's ruling,
The New York law requires that people seeking a license to carry a handgun outside their homes show a “proper cause.” California, Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey and Rhode Island have similar laws, according to briefs filed in the case.
“[Neither of the original two plaintiffs]... received unrestricted licenses because neither demonstrated a nonspeculative need to carry a handgun virtually anywhere in public,” Barbara D. Underwood, New York’s solicitor general, told the justices in a brief.
Immediately we see that the guns people have long convinced the Courts that the Second Amendment extends to private citizens who are not members or adjuncts of state militias or their equivalent. Once that is accepted as the interpretation of the Second Amendment the states' ability to "well regulate" is fucked. That gets you into this squishy, ambiguous, "proper cause" stuff where the people have an unbridled right and any state infringement thereupon requires some heightened scrutiny by the courts, as opposed to "You have a highly conditional right to bear arms which the states have a right to 'well regulate' by requiring membership, subject to state approval, in a state militia or equivalent and perhaps a reserve force."
