It's a great day for America

From Supreme Court Associate Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the majority decision:

The city of Chicago (City) and the village of Oak Park, a Chicago suburb, have laws that are similar to the District of Columbia’s, but Chicago and Oak Park argue that their laws are constitutional because the Second Amendment has no application to the States. We have previously held that most of the provisions of the Bill of Rights apply with full force to both the Federal Government and the States. Applying the standard that is well established in our case law, we hold that the Second Amendment right is fully applicable to the States....

It's about damn time! The Supreme Court has essentially been kicking the can down the road on this issue since the 14th Amendment was approved in 1868, and even before then. Why the 14th? That amendment ensured that states could not deprive Americans (especially former slaves) of their unalienable rights, which included life, liberty, and property. Since the Bill of Rights were originally written to only limit the power of the federal government, the 14th Amendment forced the states to abide by the Bill of Rights as well.

Members of Congress who worked on the 14th Amendment at the time of its inception were pretty clear about its impact on self-defense rights:

Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens, who was directly involved in ratifying the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, was not ambiguous about whether the right to keep and bear arms applied to the states.

“Disarm a community and you rob them of the means of defending life. Take away their weapons of defense and you take away the inalienable right of defending liberty,” Stevens said. “The Fourteenth Amendment, now so happily adopted, settles the whole question.”

Now with this 5-4 decision on McDonald vs. City of Chicago, the 2nd Amendment has now officially been incorporated into the states, just as the 1st, 4th, 5th, and 8th Amendments have been previously.

Now we get to hear the usual hollering and wailing from the firearmphobia crowd as they hysterically talk out of their caboose about all the increased shootings and killings that will happen in the wake of this decision and the almost-inevitable rollbacks of local anti-gun laws. Of course, not only will gun crimes not increase, they will invariably go down, as they have shown to do everywhere that law-abiding citizens have gained the ability to better exercise their unalienable right to defend themselves. Even crime-infested Washington D.C. has seen a dramatic drop in murder rates after the Supreme Court's recent Heller decision struck down just some of D.C.'s draconian gun control laws.

Let's hope California gets a clue with a quickness so I can start lawfully carrying in and around Sacramento.

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson