The Supreme Court just came down with an atrocious decision on the right to bear arms.

Now, despite what the Founders wrote and intended, and despite the settled law of the land for the past seven decades, the reactionary majority, including the swinger Justice Kennedy, have now conferred on individuals the right to own a handgun, and maybe even a machine gun.

Because how the Court down the road will wrestle with what regulations are permissible and what are not remains wide open.

All we know for sure is that the District of Columbia’s handgun ban didn’t pass muster.

What Scalia did in his majority opinion was basically disregard the preamble about “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state.”

But that’s what concerned the Founders: the ability of states to defend themselves, as sovereign states.

In fact, as Justice Stevens notes in his dissent, the “Framers rejected proposals that would have broadened its coverage” to include the civilian, individual use of arms, for hunting or self-defense. (Those are his italics, by the way.)

“Neither the text of the Amendment nor the arguments advanced by its proponents evidenced the slightest interest in limiting any legislature’s authority to regulate private civilian use of firearms,” Stevens wrote.

A second major problem with Scalia’s decision is that “the protection the Amendment provides is not absolute,” as Justice Breyer noted in his dissent. “The District’s law is consistent with the Second Amendment even if that Amendment is interpreted as protecting a wholly separate interest in individual self-defense. That is so because the District’s regulation, which focuses upon the presence of hanguns in high-crime urban areas, represents a permissible legislative response to a serious, indeed life-threatening problem.”

The third reason Scalia & Company misfired is because they disdained the settled law. Their argument, said Stevens, was an “insufficient reason to disregard a unanimous opinion of this Court, upon which substantial reliance has been placed b legislators and citizens for nearly 70 years.”

Stevens was referring to United States v. Miller, which was decided back in 1939.

But overturning this precedent didn’t bother Scalia and the so-called conservative majority at all.

Because they are activist judges, of the worst sort.