Scalia surprise: Some guns can be banned

Good morning. Welcome to O-Pinion. I'm associate editor Fannie Flono, your host today. The summer Olympics is the hot news right now - and there's been so far only one minor political dustup with Mitt Romney inspiring some angry retorts from Brits when he questioned whether London was ready to host the games. It was a minor slip-up but any slip of the tongue from a presidential candidate is going to get over-the-top news coverage.

But back here at home Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the high court's most vocal and conservative justices, said something that should have gotten a bit more coverage. On Fox News Sunday, Scalia seemed to scale back from what has become entrenched conservative dogma about gun control, saying that Second Amendment leaves room for U.S. legislatures to regulate guns, including menacing hand-held weapons.

According to the National Journal, Scalia said there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers that banned some dangerous weapons, and a strict constitutionalist recognizes that. He also said that "there were also locational limitations" on where weapons could be carried. Regulation of weapons, he said, "will have to be decided in future cases." Scalia said. But there were legal precedents from the days of the Founding Fathers,

When asked if that kind of precedent would apply to assault weapons, or 100-round ammunition magazines like those used in the recent Colorado movie theater massacre, Scalia declined to speculate. "We'll see," he said. '"It will have to be decided."

"Some [bans or limitations] undoubtedly are [permissible] because there were some that were acknowledged at the time" the Constitution was written, Scalia said. He cited a practice from that era known as "frighting," where people "carried around a really horrible weapon just to scare people, like a head axe or something. That was, I believe, a misdemeanor."

“My starting point and probably my ending point will be what limitations are within the understood limitations that the society had at the time,” he said. “They had some limitations on the nature of arms that could be borne. So we’ll see what those limitations are as applied to modern weapons.”

Well now.

Following the recent Aurora, Colo., movie theater shootings where 12 were killed and dozens were injured, Scalia's view that the constitution does put limits on a person's right to bear arms is a welcome view. It might not be one in which some conservatives or the National Rifle Association share however.

What do you think?