Here’s a puffy HufPo piece on how courts are impeding the efforts of the controllers.  Here’s the bit that captured my attention.

“It’s a completely crazy standard,” University of Chicago legal scholar Albert Alschuler said. “They have turned the interpretation of the Second Amendment completely upside down.”

[ … ]

The application of strict scrutiny allowed state governments to claim that gun laws served an important safety interest. This allowed some laws to remain standing despite Heller’s assertion of an individual right to own firearms.

The new historical test, however, provides sweeping power to judges to interpret history as they see fit to strike down gun laws they oppose.

“The revolution has been going on at least since Heller,” Alschuler said. “But it took an enormous step with this Bruen decision.”

I’ll agree with him insofar as he points out that Heller was a weak decision.  It left doubt in place as to the right to carry outside the home.  In spite of the fact that the founders of the nation literally carried rifles to school in order to shoot critters for meals or other reasons, and despite the fact that men were required to carry rifles to church on Sunday for protection of the congregation, the controllers began putting more and more burdensome regulations in place.

They know better because they’re lawyers and have been trained that Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, Warren v. DC, and DeShaney v. Winnebago County all demonstrate without a shadow of a doubt that the police aren’t there to protect anyone.

They have all allowed their politics to interfere with being good historians and lawyers.  But Bruen did do what Heller and McDonald didn’t – it recognized the right to self defense outside the home.

It upended their cart.  Thus, the highly emotional and charged language coming from alleged scholars, who cannot fathom why there even exists such a right to begin with.

Oh, and that part about “sweeping power to judges to interpret history as they see fit to strike down gun laws they oppose” is just him making things up out of whole cloth.

Mark Smith has been very clear with his analysis of Bruen, and the SCOTUS was clear before that.  Laws that were in place at the time the 2A was written are fair game.  As are laws in place before that generation perished.  Laws subsequent to that are not, unless they confirm the laws in place at the time of the founding.  Subsequent (later in time) examples can NEVER deny the understanding of the 2A when it was penned.  Another way of saying it is that gun control laws that have burdened the public subsequent to the 2A don’t get to count in our understanding of the 2A, and that makes perfect sense to any reasonable man (and any good historian).

This test is simple.  There is no lack of clarity.  There is no sweeping power granted to judges, in fact, just the opposite.  Judges have been shackled, as they should have been, and as have legislators.

I’ll tell you what.  There is so much to say about this topic that I’ll write Prof. Albert Alschuler (facultysupport@law.uchicago.edu) and offer to debate him on the 2A.  We can use these pages to do that, and I’ll promise to publish his prose without editorializing, and then respond in separate posts.

How does that sound, professor?