7th Circuit Rules 2nd Amendment does NOT apply to the states

Suppose Wisconsin were to decide that private ownership
of long guns, but not handguns, would best serve the
public interest in an effective militia; it is not clear that
such a decision would be antithetical to a decision made in
1868. (The fourteenth amendment was ratified in 1868,
making that rather than 1793 the important year for
determining what rules must be applied to the states.)
Suppose a state were to decide that people cornered in
their homes must surrender rather than fight back—in
other words, that burglars should be deterred by the
criminal law rather than self help. That decision would
imply that no one is entitled to keep a handgun at home for
self-defense, because self-defense would itself be a crime,
and Heller concluded that the second amendment protects
only the interests of law-abiding citizens. See United States
v. Jackson, 555 F.3d 635 (7th Cir. 2009) (no constitutional
right to have guns ready to hand when distributing illegal
drugs).
Our hypothetical is not as farfetched as it sounds. Selfdefense
is a common-law gloss on criminal statutes, a
defense that many states have modified by requiring
people to retreat when possible, and to use non-lethal force
when retreat is not possible. Wayne R. LaFave, 2 Substantive
Criminal Law §10.4 (2d ed. 2003). An obligation to avoid
lethal force in self-defense might imply an obligation to use
pepper spray rather than handguns. A modification of the
self-defense defense may or may not be in the best interest
of public safety—whether guns deter or facilitate crime is
an empirical question, compare John R. Lott, Jr., More Guns,
Less Crime (2d ed. 2000), with Paul H. Rubin & Hashem
Dzehbakhsh, The effect of concealed handgun laws on crime, 23
International Rev. L. & Econ. 199 (2003), and Mark Duggan,
More Guns, More Crime, 109 J. Pol. Econ. 1086 (2001)—but it
is difficult to argue that legislative evaluation of which
weapons are appropriate for use in self-defense has been
out of the people’s hands since 1868. The way to evaluate
the relation between guns and crime is in scholarly journals
and the political process, rather than invocation of ambiguous
texts that long precede the contemporary debate. See
Clark v. Arizona, 548 U.S. 735 (2006) (state may reformulate,
and effectively abolish, insanity defense); Martin v. Ohio,
480 U.S. 228 (1987) (state may assign to defendant the
burden of raising, and proving, self-defense).

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