Mike McIntire
speaker
322 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 28 Jul
Mike McIntire’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
That was a big break from what had sort of been the conventional wisdom that the Second Amendment is intended to do what it says it does, which is to preserve the ability of citizens to come together in the form of a well-regulated militia in defense of the state, because the
Founders were deeply fearful of having a professional standing army that could be used against the people.
And in the Heller decision, Justice Antonin Scalia looked back to one of the very few cases in the past in which the Supreme Court ever even took up the Second Amendment.
It just didn't come up very much.
And it was a 1939 case.
involving a career criminal who had violated the law by possessing a sawed-off shotgun without paying the proper registration fee and licensing requirement.
And the challenge to that law was that the gun, in this case a sawed-off shotgun, was protected by the Second Amendment.
The court decided it was not, but they had a very cramped, kind of odd decision that explained it.
And what they said was is that
They looked back and thought about, would this be the kind of gun that would have been commonly used by a citizen militia?
Would it have been useful for a militia?
And they decided, no, it would not.
And therefore, it was not protected by the Second Amendment.
This is kind of a passing reference in a very short and kind of convoluted decision that Scalia seized upon and then turned into a test.
which has been used going forward ever since.
So there's a lot of debate amongst constitutional scholars about the wisdom of that particular decision that he made and how the test has been used and deployed by lower courts.
Well, it's sort of a case-by-case basis in terms of the type of firearms we're talking about.
So the Heller decision was looking specifically at handguns that were being kept at home for self-defense purposes.
And it's pretty clear that there are a lot of them out there.
you can say they're in common use.
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