Assailing the unjustified Second Amendment limits in Heller

As Randy Barnett notes here, "Nelson Lund has just uploaded to SSRN a new and important criticism of Justice Scalia's opinion in DC v. Heller ... [which] considers the exceptions to this right identified by Justice Scalia in dicta."  The new piece, titled "The Second Amendment, Heller, and Originalist Jurisprudence," is available at his link.  Here is part of the abstract:

[Heller] was a near perfect opportunity for the Court to demonstrate that original meaning jurisprudence is not just "living constitutionalism for conservatives," and it would been perfectly feasible to provide that demonstration.  Instead, Justice Scalia's majority opinion makes a great show of being committed to the Constitution's original meaning, but fails to carry through on that commitment.

In a narrow sense, the Constitution was vindicated in Heller because the Court reached an easily defensible originalist result.  But the Court's reasoning is at critical points so defective — and so transparently defective in some respects — that Heller should be seen as an embarrassment for those who joined the majority opinion.  I fear that it may also be widely (though unfairly) seen as an embarrassment for the interpretive approach that the Court purported to employ.  Originalism deserved better from its judicial defenders.

One section of Professor Lund's paper focuses on the the unjustified dicta assertion in Heller that Second Amendment rights could be completely eliminated for any and all felons.  As regular readers know, I have been troubled by that aspect of the Heller ruling from the very outset.

Some related Second Amendment posts:

• Justice Scalia sells out felon gun rights, but on what basis exactly?
• Former SG Ted Olson suggests Heller could impact broad prohibitions on felon gun rights
• What if no lower court judges participate in a "Second Amendment Revolution"
• Has there been a single pro-gun-rights rulings in lower courts since Heller?
• An argument that the Second Amendment and Heller should help Weldon Angelos
• District Court rejects Second Amendment claim from misdemeanant
• Another (too?) brief opinion rejecting misdemeanant's Second Amendment claim
• What might 2009 have in store for . . . Second Amendment jurisprudence?
• Starting to make the Second Amendment case for Plaxico Buress
• "The New Second Amendment: A Bark Worse Than Its Right"