Based upon this holding, the Court struck down the federal District of Columbia statute which generally barred the possession of firearms in the District unless a person held a firearms license, a document not issued by the District for many years. The Heller Court also struck down the District’s “prohibition against rendering any lawful firearm in the home operable for the purpose of immediate self-defense.”
And in 2010 gun rights supporters were buoyed again when the Supreme Court declared in McDonald v. City of Chicago that the Second Amendment was a “fundamental right.” Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito invoked the magic words from a case known as Palko v. Connecticut to “incorporate” the Second Amendment through the “due process” clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to limit the powers of the sovereign 50 states in the same way that the Second Amendment limits federal power:
“In sum, it is clear that the Framers and ratifiers of the Fourteenth Amendment counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamental rights necessary to our system of ordered liberty," wrote Justice Alito.The Chicago gun ban was struck down, and precedent was presumably set to take down other state and local restrictions on the right to keep and carry weapons in case of confrontation. And moreover, as a “fundamental” right, courts are supposed to tip the scales in favor of the right – to give “strict scrutiny” to governmental regulations limiting the right to keep and carry weapons in case of confrontation.
In other words, going forward after McDonald, the government was supposed to usually lose, and the people were supposed to usually win, Second Amendment cases.
But then things got weird.
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My name is Willy Bernhard Bils. I hold a law degree from the University of Oregon. I passed the Arizona bar in 1991. I have been a consumer and civil rights advocate since entering law school in 1984. In law school I focused my elective studies on civil and consumer rights, particularly student privacy rights involving the use of Social Security numbers. After graduating, I continued my efforts in this regard in Southern Arizona. I met Michael Stollenwerk at a privacy conference in 1992 in Providence, Rhode Island, sponsored by the Privacy Journal. At the time, Stollenwerk was an Army officer who claimed interest in furthering the same goals as I had been working on for many years. He had no legal experience and seemed to me a very earnest individual. Following our meeting, we exchanged information. What I was received from him was work performed at his expense by a law office inexperienced with privacy. In my haste to assist his efforts, I allowed him access to my full research files. I assumed his word was good in terms of his promises to provide me compensation for my work, should he win his case against the State of Pennsylvania. In the end, however, I received nothing from Stollenwerk, who essentially passed my work to his attorney in Pennsylvania, who won his case. This is a warning to those who work with Michael Stollenwerk. Get everything in writing from this man. I possess legally recorded phone calls from my dealings with him. Truth is a complete defense. If you are interested in obtaining information on privacy law and advocacy, contact me at the Center for the Study of Privacy Rights, Po Box 44326, Tucson,Arizona 85733; telephone: (520) 302-2797
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