Heller and the Second Amendment stir up controversy

The AP has this new piece noting that some notable judicial conservatives are assailing Justice Scalia’s activism in the Heller Second Amendment case.  Here are snippets from the article:

The judges, J. Harvie Wilkinson of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., and Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Chicago, take Scalia to task for engaging in the same sort of judicial activism he regularly disdains….

Wilkinson said elected officials are in a better position to determine gun laws than the courts. He compared the gun case to Roe v. Wade, the abortion rights decision that conservatives consider among the court’s worst….

Posner, writing in The New Republic last month, said of Scalia’s work in Heller: “The decision … is evidence that the Supreme Court, in deciding constitutional cases, exercises a freewheeling discretion strongly flavored with ideology.”

Though I do not think too much of the label “judicial activist,” it does seem to be a reasonable description of Justice Scalia’s work in Heller.  But this is one reason why I like the Heller outcome.  As Damon Root rightly asserts in this essay at Reason, “the courts have been at their historic best when rejecting the will of the majority and acting in defense of individual rights.”