The court also gave a township in Illinois the right to ban handguns.

Knoxville's position is somewhat unique (and I might add untested in the courts) because the Tennessee constitution defines fairly precisely the state militia (it can be reasonably argued that unless one is a conscientious objector one there is an expectation from the state that one is armed) as well as the terms of being a conscientious objector.

Because of our unique position as home of the state's land grant university as well as our being a major provider of medical services for the region our local government would likely be recognized and possibly granted additional powers of regulation should it opt out of the state militia system. This, of course is a hypothetical argument, as I doubt the will exists in council or commission to propose such a thing.

D.C.'s power to regulate would fall, at least partly to congress, and I'm not sure how exactly that would relate to Tennessee. It's hard to extend a D.C. ruling across the nation because of the unique governing circumstances surrounding its existence.

That all being said here is a partial list of 2nd amendment rulings.

(link...)

Much like the Bible, one can stroll through the various rulings and make many different conclusions. If I get a wild hair I'll look through my notes on my old radio show and see If I can find the various cases that I brought to the table then.

When I tried to google the handgun ban in Illinois Supreme Court ruling , all I got was the new case on concealed weapons that hasn't been heard yet. As I said, the key to change is opening a rational debate, so I wouldn't actually call the essay a rant. Granted, it's been about twelve years since I visited the topic at an in depth level, but it's a far deeper topic at a constitutional level than your basic gun nut would lead you to believe.

I was thinking of the Illinois ruling banning handguns from a township near Chicago, but you would be correct, I think, that a gun ban, would likely not extend to all citizens or weapons.

I've corrected my original post to indicate thus.

It does not give you or I the right to own a weapon, except in the context of our involvement with a militia to defend our freedom.

This a point gun nuts pound on. The constitution does not give you the right to target shoot. It does not give you the right to hunt. It does not give you the right to participate in sporting clays competition. And it does not give you the right to own the gun as an individual for an individual purpose.

It gives an individual the right to own a weapon as a part of a militia in order to secure his or her collective group's freedom.

In Tennessee, all citizens , except conscientious objectors, are recognized as part of our state's militia. As a result, there is a reasonable expectation by the state, and it's citizens, that all citizens are armed. Perhaps it's time to broaden those disqualified by the state, and regulate their access.

Lack of mental health care is a huge part of the issue, and every bit the conundrum that gun control is. For instance, "How do we identify the mentally ill that are a threat to society without violating their HIPPA right?"

The key to change is first instigating a rational civil discourse.

seems obvious that this is a chemical problem-I d love to see the correlation between the explosion of antidepressant medications and rise of suicide and/or mayhem type mass murder.

(link...)

Here's a link to that ruling. You make an interesting point that McDonald is more relevant than Hellers, but upon perusal of the McDonald decision, it appears that the courts wasted no time in changing the constitutional view of which weapons individuals access to and the variety of legitimate purposes they were allowed for based upon building upon the Heller ruling.(pardon my sentence structure. I've been reading Alito.)

The more I read, the more disturbing I find the Supreme Courts active role in placing guns in the hands of lunatics. These rulings have become an undoing of years of common sense rulings that recognized that there needed to be certain common sense regulations when dealing with gun ownership. This current Supreme Court has taken it upon themselves, in a series of 5-4 ruling to literally rewrite the constitution to fit their own version of what they want the U.S. to be. (See Scalia's opinion in Heller).

I had no idea until today of the real damage this court was doing to the fabric of American rule of law. Their actions were nothing but a pre-facto endorsement of future gun crimes by anyone not previously convicted of a crime. Their rulings effectively prevent any regulation of firearms relating to the future commission of violence. Our entire national and local policy now boils down to, "Make sure you can shoot back."

AMY GOODMAN: We turn now to the Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore, who won that award for his 2002 documentary, Bowling for Columbine, about gun violence in the United States. On Friday night, Michael Moore appeared at the Bring Leonard Peltier Home 2012 event at the Beacon Theatre here in New York City, speaking just hours after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre.

MICHAEL MOORE: Earlier today, a crazy man went to an elementary school and attacked 22 children in China. A few hours before Connecticut, an elementary school was attacked in China by an insane man, and 22 children were his victims. But all he had was a knife. Total number of dead in the Chinese elementary school? Zero.

I hope you don’t mind, but I’d like to just say a few words about what happened today, because I’ve been concerned about this issue for a long time. Yes, we need more gun control. Yes, we need free mental health services in this country. But I really believe that even if we had better gun control laws and better mental health, that we would still be the sort of sick and twisted, violent people that we’ve been for hundreds of years, that it’s something that’s just in our craw, just in our DNA. And to get that out of our DNA is going to take a lot more than passing a bill in Albany or D.C. That’s not going to do it.

And, you know, other countries, I mean, they have their crazy people, and they have people that—there have been shootings and killings in Norway, in France and in Germany. But there haven’t been 61 mass killings like there have been in this country just since Columbine. Sixty-one mass shootings in this country. I like to say that I sort of agree with the NRA when they say, "Guns don’t kill people, people kill people," except I would just modify that a bit and say, "Guns don’t kill people, Americans kill people," because that’s what we do. We invade countries. We send drones in to kill civilians. We’ve got five wars going on right now where our soldiers are killing people—I mean, five that we know of. We are on the short list of illustrious countries who have the death penalty. We believe it’s OK to kill you when you’ve committed a crime.

And then we have all the other forms of violence in this country that we don’t really call violence, but they are acts of violence. When you—when you make sure that 50 million people don’t have health insurance in your country and that, according to the congressional study that was done, 44,000 people a year die in America for the simple reason that they don’t have health insurance, that’s a form of murder. That murder is being committed by the insurance companies. When you evict millions of peoples—millions of people from their homes, that’s an act of violence. That’s called a home invasion.

All the wrong people are in prison in this country. I can’t believe we’re just standing blocks away from the biggest criminal operation that this country has ever seen, right down that street, and not one of them has gone to prison for what they’ve done. When you have eliminated so many millions of jobs, when you’ve ruined communities like mine, Flint, Michigan, you have killed people, because—because having seen firsthand the effects of these corporate decisions—the alcoholism, the drug abuse, divorce, suicide, all the social problems that go along with this act of violence—but we don’t call it violence, and no one’s ever arrested for it—I think it’s a real shame. And frankly, as an American, this is not how I want to be remembered.

AMY GOODMAN: Michael Moore, the Oscar-winning filmmaker, won the Academy Award for Bowling for Columbine after the Columbine massacre, speaking on Friday night just hours after the—after the massacre in Connecticut. Special thanks to filmmaker Lorna Tucker, who’s currently working on a documentary with the working title Leonard Peltier: An American Prisoner.