Ever since I was a kid, I was frustrated by clueless people who said, “The Second Amendment is about the National Guard or something.” Yeah, right…as if one of the most carefully crafted documents in the history of the human experience, devoted to individual human rights, would somehow have strangely included states’ rights to raise militias.

For decades, Constitutional scholars have again and again determined that The Second did indeed speak to an individual right. Our current President’s first Attorney General stated that in an official opinion. It was obvious to anyone who didn’t have an agenda.

Now, at long, long last, the Supreme Court of the United States has spoken. They have confirmed – hopefully once and for all – that the Second Amendment is indeed an individual “right to keep and bear arms.” It is truly historic, a genuine “landmark decision.”

The fallout was instantaneous. In Chicago, literally fifteen minutes after the SCOTUS decision was announced, the Second Amendment Foundation and the Illinois State Rifle Association pulled the trigger of an already cocked hammer, a lawsuit challenging the Constitutionality of Chicago’s long standing ban on law-abiding citizens’ ownership of handguns. Early indications are that the Heller decision, in shooting down (pun intended) Washington, DC’s similar ban, will make the termination of Chicago’s current, onerous law a slam-dunk. Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley, raving against the decision, literally experienced a meltdown in his emotional press conference. The guy was practically babbling. Always a good thing to see in someone who has declared himself an enemy of you and your kind.

The decision came down on the first day of a Lethal Force Institute LFI-I class I was teaching in Harrisburg, PA. The 28 adult students literally cheered. Well, we had all waited a long time to hear this decision. The majority opinion written by Justice Scalia is said to be a model of logical, cogent jurisprudence.

Several of the students agreed that, to them, it would be one of those moments so pivotal to what they believed in, that they would always remember where they were when they heard the news.

Some of the more hard-core gun folks out there seem to consider the decision a failure, since it doesn’t automatically authorize everyone to carry a gun everywhere, nor allow the general public to buy machine guns the way they’d purchase a .22. These people have not figured out, apparently, that (a) none of those issues were on point to the instant case, and (b) the history of people who demand all or nothing is that they end up with…nothing. The simple fact is, the Heller decision is a landmark victory for the rights of citizens to protect themselves…a victory for civil rights of gun owners, and for the basic human right of self-protection.

I’ve been teaching more than ten hours a day, and doing class-related management stuff after hours, and have not yet had time to read the 157-page decision in all its detail. It can be found here.

We’ll be talking about this more down the line. It’s time to hear the opinions of the readers of this blog on the Heller decision.

What say you?

Mas was teaching this armed self-defense class when the Heller decision was announced.