I refer to this decision.
The underlining is mine, and they are the parts that puzzle me. I thought the SCOTUS ruling on guns was quite significant for the whole country but it seems to state here that it does not apply to ‘states and municipalities’. Does that mean the judgment of SCOTUS last year only had bearing on the federal district of DC?
Essentially, yes, at least in the (fairly estimable) understanding of Judge Easterbrook, who is not ordinarily known for being left-leaning.
The Bill of Rights imposes restrictions on the operations of the federal government. The liberties guaranteed therein can be applied to the states by incorporation. Briefly, incorporation uses the Fourteenth Amendment’s prohibition on state deprivations of life, liberty, and property without due process. The liberty interests protected by that amendment’s Due Process Clause are identified by various formulations (“implicit in the concept of ordered liberty” being one of the more common). Typically, this is thought to embrace the rights protected in the first ten amendments; as yet, however, incorporation has not been applied to all of them, including the Second Amendment.
Finally, as an aside, you should also take away this: Easterbrook (and his two colleagues) could have incorporated the Second Amendment; the Ninth Circuit has done so (according to Wikipedia, natch, I’m not pulling the cite). Were he to do so however, he would be taking a so-called “judicial activist” approach, overruling the democratically elected Chicago City Council and undoing its handgun ban by extending the ambit of the Second Amendment on substantive due process grounds.
One thing to remember and this sometime confuses people is that court rulings CAN differ in various parts of the country. One of the things we’ve had a problem with for the last decade was that TSCOTUS has not been clear sometimes. For instance, we’ve had a federal district rule one way in the east and the west another federal district will rule the opposite. Normally TSCOTUS will then take the case and decided who is right and who made the error.
But we’ve also had cases where TSCOTUS has simply declined to hear it. So you have two very similar laws with different results in different areas of the country. Simply because the federal districts ruled differently. It’s most noted in the ninth district which is out of San Francisco, which is more liberal than other districts.
So not only can you have difference in state laws you can differences in how the federal government applies the same laws in different areas.
The decision in Heller only applied to the federal government. The DC law was the only one affected because it was the only law at the federal level that banned possession of firearms commonly owned for self-defense within the home or for other (unspecified by SCOTUS) lawful purposes.
The SCOTUS decision in DC v. Heller explicitly stated that the question of whether the Second Amendment applies to the states was not before the court in Heller, and therefore they did not address it. They did indicate that Cruikshank and Presser may not be good precedents for not incorporating the Second Amendment, as that was before SCOTUS began incorporating rights under the 14th Amendment–Cruikshank held that the First Amendment did not apply to the states, a stance that has since been reversed under the 14th Amendment.
There are currently three cases regarding incorporporation of the Second Amendment making their way through the courts–NRA v. Chicago and Maloney v. Cuomo, the respective Seventh and Second Circuit decisions declining to incorporate the Second Amendment (Maloney has been in the news some recently since Judge Sotamayor was on the panel that decided it), and Nordyke v. King, a Ninth Circuit case incorporating it.
So currently the Second Amendment only applies to state and local governments within the Ninth Circuit. A disagreement between circuit courts makes it likely that one of these cases will be heard before SCOTUS before too long.