Because we're not talking about something like your ability to smoke weed here - the right to bear arms is a constitutional one.
You might as well ask 'why do people love states rights except when it comes to free speech?' Same thing in my book.
You might as well ask 'why do people love states rights except when it comes to free speech?' Same thing in my book.
Doesn't matter a bit to me, though - it's incorporated now.
Although it remains to be seen if this means much of anything, the changes on the ground to date are minimal to nothing. They recently denied cert in an appeal of NY's capricious concealed carry laws, and have given Illinois extra time to appeal an opposite direction decision against it. Keep and bear arms, after all.
The whole process of incorporation has been a modern attempt at redrawing the boundaries of federalism to address things the Founders got wrong. The most decisive revision was with regards to slavery/civil rights, where the Constitution was revised at the point of sword with the 13th, 14th, and 15th amendments. A lot of other things have come along for the ride (from free speech to abortion), but all of that is rooted in a modern understanding of what states can be trusted to do.
Consider a hypothetical where 90% of the population was in favor of state-level gun bans. If you held up the 2nd Amendment in opposition to that consensus, you'd be in the position of arguing that states should be constrained in a way that neither the framers nor contemporary consensus contemplates them being constrained.
You already acknowledged that the 2nd Amendment is incorporated, so I'm sure I just don't follow the point you're making with the hypothetical.
He goes on to add that "with the defeat of the British [for whom gun grabbing was a major strategy and what sparked the war], no one feared that the natural and common-law right to have arms was any longer in danger."
Among other things, how could the states be allowed to prevent the Congress from calling up the militia, one of the latter's enumerated powers?
You're also skipping the step in 14th Amendment jurisprudence where it was explicitly passed to protect freedmen from things like stripping them of the RKBA, and it was judicially nullified in 5 years. That the Supremes started taking it seriously decades later is not a bad thing, at least if you care about the rule of law. That they took 140 years to apply it to the 2nd Amendment has more than a little to do with today's lack of respect for a Federal government which all too often holds itself as being above the law.
Fun factoid #2, most states had (varying degrees of) "official" religions. This 14th amendment ruling also ended state support of religion in the few states that hadn't changed their constitutions by that time.
Fun factoid #3: This ruling happend about a month before the Scopes trial [2]. Interesting time the 1920s.