To Glenn Reynolds

In the spirit of the pre-mortem combined with an alternate history, I wonder if you would comment on what the world and the law would look like if the Supreme Court sided with the numerous amicus briefs in Parker v. District of Columbia and decided that the right to keep and bear arms was literally only found in the context of a well regulated militia? In other words, if the Supreme Court comes back and says that absent explicit regulations promulgated by congress, there is no inalienable individual right to bear arms, but instead there is only a collective right; what comes next? Would a Democrat congress fall all over itself to draft militia regulations that essentially preserved the status quo? Would western and southern states rush to ensure gun rights? Would northern cities move to confiscate guns? And, hypothetically, if the Supreme Court comes in decisively on the other side of a professor’s lifetime of legal scholarship, would that repudiate the professor’s work? Or do things not work that way?

Just curious.

And just so you know where I am coming from, I have a Bersa Thunder 45 Ultra Compact and I am a 6 time pistol expert in the Marine Corps. I firmly believe that there should be an explicit right to keep and bear arms, independent of a well regulated militia. I think the drafters of the constitution let us down in not being more explicit in the Bill of Rights. The Founder’s unwarranted verbosity in the Second Amendment has let lawyers and legislators perpetrate mischief on us ever since. But then, I guess unwarranted verbosity and mischief is pretty much the stock in trade for legislators and lawyers, but that is a separate issue.

Front sight press.