This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, June 22nd, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court is poised to put some meat on the bones of the Heller decision

in which the court found that the second amendment does

contain an individual right to keep and bear arms and once the right is

incorporated against the states it may not be a slam dunk that the highest

level of judicial review should apply.

So says David Koppel, associate policy analyst at the Cato Institute.

The Heller decision was about the handgun ban in the District of Columbia.

The D.C. City Council's powers are exclusively grants from Congress,

according to our Constitution.

So Heller was about whether the Second Amendment was meaningful at all, but Heller decided only that the Second Amendment was a limit on the Federal Government directly, as every portion of the Bill of Rights is.

McDonald asks the question,

does the Second Amendment apply to the state and local governments

via the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment, as almost all of the

rest of the Bill of Rights has been held to so apply.

So opening this issue up of the 14th Amendment,

it opens several other issues related

to how the Second Amendment may be applied

to under specific circumstances, times, places,

a broad range of issues.

I think one of the reasons the Supreme Court

...