Aguila Blanca said:
This is true. Look at all the furor that followed the Heller decision. For years, various people on the anti-gun side had been arguing that the 2A "meant" that the right to keep and bear arms applied only to militia duty [and that, since today the National Guard is the militia, it meant that only the NG should have guns]. Then Antonin Scalia upended that with a scholarly dissection of grammar and sentence construction, and -- by a 5-4 vote -- it became the law of the land that the right to keep and bear arms is NOT linked to service in the militia (or the National Guard).
And Hillary Clinton (who is a lawyer) has stated that Mr. Scalia was wrong.
My understanding is that by the 1990s, the majority of legal journal articles on the issue were of the opinion that the Second was protecting an individual right. That the anti-gun side fought it out with them and lost. The problem when
Heller happened is that so many of the anti's have no knowledge of any of this scholarship. To a person well-informed on the debate, there was nothing really new or original to anything Scalia said in his decision. He was just summarizing the conclusions reached through decades of research on the subject that have been around for years.
Regarding Hillary and other such lawyers, IMO being a lawyer unto itself doesn't really give one any kind of in-depth understanding of the Second Amendment, hence why so many have so little understanding of it. Even high-level lawyers, for example Chief Justice Warren Burger in 1991, said about the NRA's claiming the Second protects an individual right: “One of the greatest pieces of fraud, I repeat the word fraud, on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”
Now, IMO, he would never have said that if he'd had any understanding himself of the scholarship on the issue, because anyone familiar with the scholarship, even if they still disagree with the individual right interpretation, would agree that a very good case for it can nonetheless be made and it is thus easy to see why people believe it as such. His stating that also showed that he had no understanding of what the NRA even is (it is not any "special interest group").
I would also state that thus far, in online debates with people on the Amendment's meaning, I have never come across anyone that could decisively refute the individual right interpretation. Like present an argument where I read it and think, "Oh CRAP, I hadn't thought about it that way before, he has a point."
