Justice Breyer thinks banning guns is allowed under the Second Amendment

He's really stretching for this one:

If you look at the values and the historical record, you will see that the Founding Fathers never intended guns to go unregulated, Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer contended Sunday.

Appearing on "Fox News Sunday," Breyer said history stands with the dissenters in the court's decision to overturn a Washington, D.C., handgun ban in the 2008 case "D.C. v. Heller." 

Breyer wrote the dissent and was joined by Justices John Paul Stevens, David H. Souter and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. He said historians would side with him in the case because they have concluded that Founding Father James Madison was more worried that the Constitution may not be ratified than he was about granting individuals the right to bear arms.

To Justice Breyer I would say two things:  First, regardless of what Madison actually thought, he was not the only founder and his is not the only opinion to value.   Second, even if you're right, you cannot reasonably extrapolate that Madison, let alone all of the Founders, would support an outright ban on personal firearms as effectively existed in Washington DC prior to the Heller ruling.

He goes on:

"If you're interested in history, and in this one history was important, then I think you do have to pay attention to the story," Breyer said. "If that was his motive historically, the dissenters were right. And I think more of the historians were with us."

That being the case, and particularly since the Founding Fathers did not foresee how modern day would change individual behavior, government bodies can impose regulations on guns, Breyer concluded.

Do you also agree, then, that "since the Founding Fathers did not forsee how modern day would change individual behavior" that government bodies can impose regulations on speech?  Of course not.  Some would say that this analogy is not valid, but throughout history governments have decreed that certain speech is just as dangerous as a gun.  Of course, first they took away the guns, then they took away the right to speech.  There's a lesson there, methinks.

Quote of the day

Via the Patriot Post.

"More troubling than WikiLeaks' latest revelation of US secrets ... is the Obama administration's weak, wrong-headed and erratic response. Unfortunately, the administration has acted consistently with its demonstrated unwillingness to assert and defend US interests across a wide range of threats, such as Iran and North Korea, which, ironically, the leaked cables amply document. ... His secretary of state does not comprehend that America is the subject of the attack, his department of defense is not interested in defending us, and the president himself seems utterly indifferent to the whole affair. All of this underscores the real problem. It is not WikiLeaks that ultimately imperils our national security, but the failing Obama administration, which ignores the nature and extent of threats we face, and which is too often unwilling to act to thwart them." --former UN ambassador John Bolton