"Settled" means that it's never, ever going to change, because the composition of the court isn't going to change. At least not during my lifetime, and probably not yours.
It doesn't matter whether it's "justified". The Constitution means what five people on the Court say it means. And if that comes from talking to James Madison on the ouija board, the rest of us have to live with it.
In that sense, it's "settled". And our daily school shootings are just a fact that we have to accept.
Of the four court members under 60, three are conservative.
Of the remaining five members, it takes only two conservatives to ensure that the court remains that way. Assuming that future nominations are equally distributed, there's about a 2/3 chance that at least two will be conservative.
And let's just say that I don't think it will be randomly distributed. The existing court composition has a thumb on the scale of future nominees. The party that nominates conservative judges has won only one election outright this century, but until recently only one opposing candidate had been able to win -- including once because the Supreme Court directly stepped in.
It's harder to calculate just what that means, but I think it's sufficient to affirm that the odds are very long against being able to generally reverse this court's direction before Halley's Comet returns.
> "Settled" means that it's never, ever going to change, because the composition of the court isn't going to change. At least not during my lifetime, and probably not yours.
I am confident that the composition of the court will change, during my lifetime. I suspect yours as well.
FWIW, I do have a strong opinion on school shootings, of course. I am not comfortable with the assertion that there's something uniquely broken about Americans that means we can't have RTKBA. But if there is, I'm not confident that eliminating 2A would resolve the real problem.
You are allowed to be mad at a ruling you cannot change. Just don’t drag me into your feelings. Maybe it is overruled someday, that’s pretty rare. Maybe you can point to another amendment that made it almost 250 before being interpreted to say something, it does not?
I'm not mad at all. I have no feelings on the issue whatsoever, honestly.
But you're also wrong if you think there's meaningful precedent.
And BTW the entire Bill of Rights is the same age. All are subject to interpretation by the sitting Court.
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FWIW, I would place 2A lowest on my list of important entries in the BoR though. They're all important because if one is threatened then they are all threatened, but I think 2A is probably net-harmful in the current world. If there was an A/B test, with and without, I'd choose without.
2A has transformed from this vaguely self-protective/deterministic right into this bizarro testament to machismo and the absurd idea that carrying makes one safer from fellow humans, and the frankly asinine idea that it's insurance against government overreach. The statistics, and clear thinking, prove otherwise. Are you that guy? Don't be that guy.
> the frankly asinine idea that it's insurance against government overreach
Why is it asinine? It is precisely intended to be the insurance of last resort against a government that turns tyrannical. If your claim is that the might of the US military is so overwhelming that a bunch of rednecks toting AR-15s could be of no match, well, Vietnam and Afghanistan both proved that a determined and armed population is actually quite hard to conquer even for the foremost military power.
The presence of "that guy" doesn't invalidate any Constitutional right. Neo-Nazis wanting to march through Skokie is "those guys" taking the 1st Amendment to the absurd. You could say that the Miranda warning arose as a result of "those guys" defense attorneys taking the 5th amendment to the absurd. They are all still rights held by the people.
It's almost not worth trying to explain it. Some people are wired in a way that makes taking care of their own fate terrifying and they're extremely happy to outsource that to a government they know full well to be inefficient and ineffective.
*Tanks and drones don't stand on street corners.* F18s can't enforce a curfew. No amount of equipment is going to control a population. We've seen it over. Now all of that is putting aside that anyone seriously thinks our military wouldn't crumble in a second if directed internally? They're reeling from kicking kids out that didn't want covid shots and failing to recruit, watch what happens when even Career Srgt Bootlicker is asked to open fire on a street that looks just like his back home.
I'm not interested in entertaining the idea I need firearms to stop the US military. I'm cautious I would need to protect mine against the people that would support something like that.
There are good arguments that recent jurisprudence is not even justified from an Originalist perspective.
This is neither the time nor place, but your confidence is unfounded.