[The Urban Sombrero]

Prior to the Heller decision, Washington, DC had effectively made legal gun ownership impossible for most of its citizens. The analogy to the "Fire" exception to the First Amendment is ridiculous, IMO. If the government is free to regulate constitutional rights out of reach by imposing excessive barriers and costs to the exercise of those rights, then citizens are deprived of those rights as surely as if they were erased from the Constitution.

The fact is, areas of the country where liberals have been most successful in imposing gun control laws, such as Chicago, generally have higher gun crime rates than areas where Second Amendment rights are respected and widely exercised.

I believe Justice Stevens was suggesting not that the majority in HELLER was utterly wrong, but that the scope was too broad. I simply do not believe stringent regulation of an AR-15 is an excessive barrier to exercising a 2nd Amendment right. The pendulum swings in American jurisprudence, and perhaps HELLER was a corrective of a lurch too far left, but it has jolted the pendulum too far right, in my view.