Whichever side you think should have won in Heller, this right was hardly created out of whole cloth by the court.

Now, to be fair, Heller was scarcely Scalia’s finest moment. Originalism led one place, (NOT a place Wilkinson would like!) and Scalia went another. Predictably so, he’s at best a faint hearted originalist, and least likely to follow that reasoning when it says long standing (70 years, remember?) laws need to be overturned. Particularly startling was Scalia’s apparent belief that Miller had *lost* at the lower court level, when he’d been utterly vindicated, and it was the federal government appealing it’s defeat to the Supreme court.

No, not exactly a gem of a ruling.

But Wilkinson’s position amounts to insisting that the Court take it’s magic bottle of whiteout to 10% of the Bill of Rights, render it effectively repealed. That’s been done to enough of the Constitution already, and in the case of the 2nd, might have gone a fair way towards starting a civil war.

Surreal. That’s the only word for it.

I wouldn’t claim Heller was a perfect ruling, far from it, but it’s not even remotely Roe.

In particular, it would come as a vast surprise to most Americans that Heller ‘created a new right’, as Heller only upholds the commonplace understanding of the 2nd amendment. I don’t believe there’s ever been a time when it wasn’t understood to guarantee an individual right of some scope by the general populace.

And, really, the only reason for the “thicket” is that the Court spent 70 years flatly refusing to take 2nd amendment cases, while gun control laws accumulated.