Colby Cosh provides an interesting piece of perspective for Canadians who were stupefied by Justice Scalia's majority ruling in DC vs. Heller:

We in Canada are so accustomed to thinking of handguns as some sort of specially infectious social menace that it has become shocking, even for a gun-rights proponent, to hear their merits -- merits of a specifically moral sort --enumerated by the spokesman for a branch of a neighbouring government.

"There are many reasons that a citizen may prefer a handgun for home defense," Scalia wrote, ridiculing the proposed constitutionality of local measures that might restrict handgun possession only. "It is easier to store in a location that is readily accessible in an emergency; it cannot easily be redirected or wrestled away by an attacker; it is easier to use for those without the upper-body strength to lift and aim a long gun; it can be pointed at a burglar with one hand while the other hand dials the police."

Imagine it: a judge taking the right of armed household self-defence as a given! The words seem to float to us from some alternate universe very far away, one where the old common-law principle that "a man's home is his castle" was never annulled.

The foreignness of Scalia's ideas show how small social differences, like those which existed between Canada and the U. S. at the start of the 20th century, can be exaggerated by means of policy within just a few generations. In Edwardian times, his words would have been a matter of unstated common sense on our side of the border. The Canadian gun laws of the time made no provisions regulating armament in the home, and even allowed for unlicensed carry in public if the owner could show cause.

Read the rest.