Incorporation

Recently, the Ninth Circuit Court--commonly referred to as the Ninth Circus, due to it's apparently being unduly influenced by whatever it is that makes Californians so prone to weirdness-- ruled on the case Nordyke v King. The plaintiffs lost--meaning that the local government did have the right to ban gun shows at city-owned facilities--but the decision included this little bombshell:

The right to bear arms is a bulwark against external invasion. We should not be overconfident that oceans on our east and west coasts alone can preserve security. We recently saw in the case of the terrorist attack on Mumbai that terrorists may enter a country covertly by ocean routes, landing in small craft and then assembling to wreak havoc. That we have a lawfully armed populace adds a measure of security for all of us and makes it less likely that a band of terrorists could make headway in an attack on any community before more professional forces arrived.

The reason this is a bit of a bombshell is that, as Dave Workman, Gun 'Riter, leathersmith, and Seattle Gun Rights Examiner says

The court panel, with Judge Diarmuid F. O'Scannlain writing the opinion and Judge Ronald M. Gould offering a concurring opinion, rule that the Second Amendment is incorporated to the states; that is, the right to keep and bear arms that is affirmed by the Amendment now becomes a limit on state and local governments, same as it is a limit on the federal government.

So, what is this "incorporation" business, anyway? Well, Dave summed it up above: "(a) right ... affirmed by the (Constitution is) ... a limit on state and local governments, same as it is a limit on the federal government." Wikipedia, as always, as more to add:

Incorporation (of the Bill of Rights) is the American legal doctrine by which portions of the Bill of Rights are applied to the states through the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, although some have suggested that the Privileges or Immunities Clause would be a more appropriate textual basis. Prior to the ratification of the 14th Amendment and the development of the incorporation doctrine, in 1833 the Supreme Court held in Barron v. Baltimore that the Bill of Rights applied only to the Federal, but not any State, government. Even years after the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment the Supreme Court in United States v. Cruikshank, still held that the First and Second Amendment did not apply to state governments. However, beginning in the 1890s, a series of United States Supreme Court decisions interpreted the Fourteenth Amendment to "incorporate" most portions of the Bill of Rights, making these portions, for the first time, enforceable against the state governments.

That Wikipedia article contains a lot of links to a lot of legal cases, with a lot of legalese.

Many in the gun rights community hoped that the recent Heller v. DC case would end in the Second being incorporated against the states, but there really was not much of a chance of that, since the case did not involve a state...

With respect to Cruikshank's continuing validity on incorporation, a question not presented by this case, we note that Cruikshank also said that the first amendment did not apply against the states and did not engage in the sort of Fourteenth Amendment inquiry required by our later cases.

In fact, in earlier cases the Supreme Court had ruled that the Second Amendment only applied to the Federal Government. "Our later decisions in Presser v. Illinois, 116 U.S. 252, 265 (1886) and Miller v. Texas, 153 U.S. 535, 538 (1894), reaffirmed that the Second Amendment applies only to the Federal Government.^[17]" But, these things can change: Note that the Supreme Court noted above that they had ruled in Cruikshank that the First Amendment also did not apply to states...

(I don't know about you, but find it a little unnerving the way they use the first person plural to refer to decisions handed down over a hundred years ago...)

The portion of the Wiki article on Incorporation, specifically about as it applies to the Second Amendment, has been updated with information about Nordyke:

On April 20, 2009 The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in the case of Nordyke v. King held that the Second Amendment was incorporated.[18] This is a binding authority over Alaska, Arizona, California, Hawaii, Idaho, Montana, Oregon, Washington, and the U.S. territories of Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands. But it is only a persuasive authority over the remainder of the United States.

So get to persuading, you guys...

^{UPDATE: Link from OpFor to a discussion on the Nordyke decision at the SCOTUS Blog: Second Amendment extended.}