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The Ninth Amendment doesn’t convey any substantive rights.

I agree, but it does leave room for the discovery of substantive rights not included in the BoR, which was the point.

f it did, we would no longer have a Republic, we’d be living in a judicial oligarchy.

I disagree. I agree that it's possible, but I don't think it has, or could, work out that way in practice. The whole checks and balances thing works in our favor here.

All you need to do is to find a sympathetic Federal Judge to decree that a Ninth Amendment right to _________ exists.

And get that played up through the courts. I doubt that a frivolous example would make it very far.

The Ninth Amendment is a rule of construction, it was merely a codification in the Constitution designed to ensure that the common law principal of “expressio unius est exclusio alterius” would not be used to limit rights.

Agreed. That is part of what the 9th means.

Read Madison on the Ninth Amendment, he never intended it to be a vehicle for a judicial dictatorship, nor did he envision it granting substantive rights.

I have and while Madison was certainly influential in this regard he isn't the final word.

The BoR was put in place to placate the anti-federalists and they intended to protect all rights from the Federal government. They were, in fact, loathe to enumerate any because they feared (rightly so) that the list would be considered complete.

14th Amendment Incorporation is an "interpretation" that is inconsistent with the text of the Amendment, was never intended by the writers and ratifiers of the Amendment, and wasn't "discovered" by activist courts until those writers and ratifiers were all safely in their graves.

If the authors of the 14th Amendment had intended for it to "incorporate" the first eight Amendments as restrictions upon the States, they could have easily written it to say so. They didn't.

Moreover, there can't possibly be a legal justification for "incorporating" portions of the 1st Amendment (which, by its own language, is restricted to apply only to "Congress" -- i.e., just for federal laws), and not the 2nd Amendment (which is worded much more broadly).

"The true key for the construction of everything doubtful in a law is the intention of the law-makers. This is most safely gathered from the words, but may be sought also in extraneous circumstances provided they do not contradict the express words of the law." -Thomas Jefferson

A ruling on what the 14th Amendment means should be influenced by what it says, and by what it was intended to mean, when it was written and ratified. Unfortunately, that rarely happens.

The 5th Amendment says: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

The 14th Amendment says: "...nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law..."

If anyone really believes that 14th Amendment Incorporation was intended by the writers of the 14th Amendment, then he needs to explain why the 14th Amendment contains that due process clause restricting the States, which is identical in wording to the 5th Amendment's due process clause restricting the federal government. If Incorporation were intended, then the 14th Amendment would have no due process clause restricting the States, since the Incorporated 5th Amendment would obviously already do that.

It is a basic principle of legal construction that a legal provision should not be interpreted as being without meaning or effect if some other interpretation is plausible. The activist courts had to ignore that principle to invent 14th Amendment Incorporation.

The right ruling in this case would preserve the rights of state and local governments to restrict firearms, by tossing 14th Amendment Incorporation on the scrapheap of history. But that isn't going to happen.