Free Republic

Although homicides reported in New York City last year reached their lowest level since 1963, two killings of police officers late in the year raised public awareness of the problem of illegal guns on the city’s streets. In his inaugural address on Jan. 1, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg declared that a major goal of his second term would be to “rid our streets of guns, and punish all those who possess and traffic in these instruments of death.” Although the total flow of guns into the city is hard to quantify, Police Department statistics show that a majority of illegal...

SNIP - ALITO DISSENTING OPINION Maj. Op. at ----. In other words, the majority argues in effect that the private, purely intrastate possession of machine guns has a substantial effect on the interstate machine gun market. This theory, if accepted, would go far toward converting Congress's authority to regulate interstate commerce into "a plenary police power." Lopez, --- U.S. at ----, 115 S.Ct. at 1633. If there is any sort of interstate market for a commodity--and I think that it is safe to assume that there is some sort of interstate market for practically everything--then the purely intrastate possession of...