I did some research on the realities behind the Second Amendment after posting this. Perhaps you were unaware of this historical record. Judge Stephen Reinhardt obviously is, or chooses to ignore it.

The Bill of Rights were modeled after the Virginia Constitution. That document incorporated these LIMITATIONS ON THE POWER OF GOVERNMENT as part of the document. The framers of the Constitution claimed that the Constitution itself could not be changed, forcing the several states to incorporate these basic statements of the rights of the people that were theirs by birthright and not subject to infringement, modification or violation by the central government they were forming. Without these ten Amendments, the federal Constitution itself would not have been ratified and there would have been no United States of America. That's how significant these delineations of the rights of the people, primarily, and the states, secondarily, were to the founders of this nation. The author of most of the ten amendments to the basic Constitution was George Mason of Virginia. There can be no clearer source for the purpose and intent of these amendments that the man who authored and shepherded them through the first, and only, Constitutional Convention in the history of this nation.

During the floor debate on the Second Amendment, Mason was asked "Who and what are the 'militia necessary to teh security of a free state' specified in this Amendment?"

"All of the people," was his answer. Upon this, the Amendment was passed by a unanimous vote. In fact, the only one of the ten that faced any opposition whatsoever was the Tenth Amendment. That's the one that reserves any and all rights not specifically granted to the central government to the the states or the people. The only opposition was from those who were opposed to the inclusion of the three words, "to the states" in the Amendment. This Amendment barely passed because of that opposition. That gives you an idea where the mindset of the framers of this republic stood on the rights of the people.

Many who attempt to use the argument that the framers of the Bill of Rights intended for the right of the people to keep and bear arms to be limited to state operated and sanctioned militias point to the fact that this "limitation" (their argument for their belief) preceded the clause concerning "the right of the people..." Here's the real story on this specious argument. The Amendment actually passed by that Constitutional Convention, according to the actual documents used for that deliberation, had the "militia" clause after the statement concerning the right of the people. It was after passage of this Amendment and during the transcribing of the original document into the unified listing of all ten Amendments as a single package that would be submitted to the individual states for ratification that the transciptionist wrote it the other way around! Their entire argument is based on a transcribing error and nothing more. In fact, because all such documents had to be reproduced by hand in those days, the Convention decided to leave it that way because, "No thoughtful man, reflecting on the thoughts and debates of this gathering would find cause to misunderstand the intent of this body and its deliberations here. The man who said this was none other than the first Chief Justice of the newly formed Supreme Court. Should you wish to read this for yourself, there are approximately 25 books from which this information was garnered. I suggest you read them all. You might just be shocked to learn what those men really meant and how different things are today from the original intent of that body. You might even discover the greatest fear of those men. It was their actions in the establishment of a judiciary that could conceivably overrule the other two branches of government through "interpretations" that denied the intent of the framers of that document.

It looks to me as if their fears were prophetic.