Texas' online porn law could shatter a First Amendment precedent(platformer.news)

    Writing for the majority, Antonin Scalia argued that the operative clause of the amendment, “the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed,” codifies an individual right derived from English common law and codified in the English Bill of Rights (1689). The majority held that the Second Amendment’s preamble, “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” is consistent with this interpretation when understood in light of the framers’ belief that the most effective way to destroy a citizens’ militia was to disarm the citizens. The majority also found that United States v. Miller supported an individual-right rather than a collective-right view, contrary to the dominant 20th-century interpretation of that decision. (In Miller, the Supreme Court unanimously held that a federal law requiring the registration of sawed-off shotguns did not violate the Second Amendment because such weapons did not have a “reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia.”) Finally, the court held that, because the framers understood the right of self-defense to be “the central component” of the right to keep and bear arms, the Second Amendment implicitly protects the right “to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”