I would say that both sides of the aisle have been guilty of pressing their political agendas in the Courts since our country's establishment.
It is the Court's job to determine what the Constitution says in the midst of the political agendas. If you read the evidence present in the majority opinion, I think you will find that the 2nd Amendment has always protected an individual right, as expressed by the Court in 2008.
The way I read it differs. I see the words. I'm not sure what the SC saw between the lines, tbh. I agree with this:
Richard Posner, judge for the
United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, compares
Heller to
Roe v. Wade, stating that it created a federal constitutional right that did not previously exist, and he asserts that the
originalist method – to which Justice
Antonin Scalia claimed to adhere – would have yielded the opposite result of the majority opinion.
The text of the amendment, whether viewed alone or in light of the concerns that actuated its adoption, creates no right to the private possession of guns for hunting or other sport, or for the defense of person or property. It is doubtful that the amendment could even be thought to require that members of state militias be allowed to keep weapons in their homes, since that would reduce the militias' effectiveness. Suppose part of a state's militia was engaged in combat and needed additional weaponry. Would the militia's commander have to collect the weapons from the homes of militiamen who had not been mobilized, as opposed to obtaining them from a storage facility? Since the purpose of the Second Amendment, judging from its language and background, was to assure the effectiveness of state militias, an interpretation that undermined their effectiveness by preventing states from making efficient arrangements for the storage and distribution of military weapons would not make sense.
[66]
