Eddie Roth should know, as a lawyer and one who has served on the police board, that judges and lawyers (especially prosecuting attorneys) like to maintain a low profile, and many carry concealed weapons. He probably knows of a judge who kept a double-barrelled shotgun under his bench in court, or a group of Clayton lawyers who all bought 9mm Makarov pistols and brought them to their offices every day (that office building made the news some years ago, with a hostage situation). We’re not going to mention names this evening.

I know of a couple of judges who carried a concealed weapon.

But my speculation here was that the specter of unfettered mobility with guns at large in society made the justices sense of insecurity greater — hence, the narrow reach of this ruling.

My speculation here is that the specter of unfettered mobility with guns in the hands of CRIMINALS made the justices’ sense of insecurity greater.

Nice theory. But when you consider the fact that 30 seconds on Wikipedia gets you photos of all the justices, you must conclude that it wouldn’t take a very determined person to identify them.

And as to your “analysis” of Heller as tailored to restrict the right “to keep and bear arms, pretty much restricting it to one’s home,” I don’t see where you get that. While the decision (p. 57) leaves room for prohibiting guns “in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings,” it does not go on to restrict it to one’s home.

This, as every SCOTUS decision, was crafted to answer the particular question which was before the court. That question was whether a prohibition on owning, and bearing in usable form, a firearm within one’s own home, ran afoul of the constitution. In fact, the court could have overturned the DC law on privacy grounds without addressing the 2nd amendment issue. That they chose to answer, beyond any doubt, the question of whether the 2nd amendment provides an individual right, provides a gift of broadness which is certain to be applied to other cases in the future.

The Supreme Court may have personal safety issues, but the main issue in not allowing the proceedings to be televised is that they are aware that the media has this annoying habit of taking words and pictures, cutting them into sound bites that support their typically liberal viewpoints, thus distorting all facets of the legal issues involved. Such as when you imply, as good liberals always do, that conservative justices are bound by politics; that’s not what you would or did say when the Supreme Court had a liberal majority. I’m sure that back in the good, old days of an uber-activist, liberal Court that in that case, they were always doing the “right” thing and never followed election returns.