But that approach would leave some ambiguity about the Second Amendment's reach, which is why the Bush administration is uncomfortable with it. The administration worries that flatly overturning the District's law could leave federal gun laws—restrictions on machine guns, for instance—vulnerable to challenge, so it is asking the Court to declare the Second Amendment a kind of intermediate right, (emphasized by Amendment10) one that individuals hold in principle but that the government could often override in practice.I empathize with the fact that D.C. is a real headache for law enforcement people. However, the idea of interpreting the 2nd A. as an intermediate right to me means softening people up to make politically correct interpretations of the 2nd A. and other statutes more acceptable. (Politically correct interpretations of the Constitution are bad enough now anyway.) People don't seem to understand that the Constitution is amendable.
"In every event, I would rather construe so narrowly as to oblige the nation to amend, and thus declare what powers they would agree to yield, than too broadly, and indeed, so broadly as to enable the executive and the Senate to do things which the Constitution forbids." --Thomas Jefferson: The Anas, 1793. ME 1:408
Good point,
An “intermediate right” sounds a bit “an intermediately positive pregnancy test” or the coroner pronounced the victim “intermediately dead.”