Sotomayor: "The Right to Own a Gun is Clearly Not a Fundamental Right"

If the Sotomayor nomination is going to go down in flames, it will likely be on the issue of guns:

Judge Sonia Sotomayor could walk into a firestorm on Capitol Hill over her stance on gun rights, with conservatives beginning to question some controversial positions she's taken over the past several years on the Second Amendment.

Earlier this year, President Obama's Supreme Court nominee joined an opinion with the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruling that Second Amendment rights do not apply to the states.

A 2004 opinion she joined also cited as precedent that "the right to possess a gun is clearly not a fundamental right."

Ken Blackwell, a senior fellow with the Family Research Council, called Obama's nomination a "declaration of war against America's gun owners."

Such a line of attack could prove more effective than efforts to define Sotomayor as pro-abortion, efforts that essentially grasp at straws. Sotomayor's record on that hot-button issue reveals instances in which she has ruled against an abortion rights group and in favor of anti-abortion protesters, making her hard to pigeonhole.

But Sotomayor's position on gun control is far more crystallized.

Blackwell, who also ran unsuccessfully to head the Republican National Committee, told FOX News her position is "very, very disturbing."

"That puts our Second Amendment freedoms at risk," he said. "What she's basically saying is that your hometown can decide to suppress your Second Amendment freedoms."

The chief concern is her position in the 2009 Maloney v. Cuomo case, in which the court examined a claim by a New York attorney that a New York law that prohibited possession of nunchucks violated his Second Amendment rights. The Appeals Court affirmed the lower court's decision that the Second Amendment does not apply to the states.

The ruling explained that it was "settled law" that the Second Amendment applies only to limitations the federal government might seek on individual gun rights.

Despite last year's landmark Supreme Court ruling in the District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the court ruled that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms, the Maloney ruling determined that case "does not invalidate this longstanding principle" that states are not covered by the Second Amendment. (Another appeals court since the Heller case reached the opposite conclusion.)

In Sotomayor's world the 2nd Amendment means the federal government can't take away your guns, but your local city or state can. Besides ignoring the Bill of Rights it also ignores the fact that federal law is supposed to take precedence over state and local laws.

There are a lot of good Democrats who are gun owners and won't be as thrilled with this nomination as they might have been at first.

If the gun case doesn't get them, the obvious reverse discrimination approved by Sotomayor in the New Haven firefighter case might.

Both cases should also be a wake-up calls to voters that this nominee is right in line philosophically with Obama. If you don't like what she stands for, you might want to make a better choice in 2012.