Sea Change on the 2nd Amendment

This post may be longish, apologies in advance.

Today, in what has been expected (including by me) for two years, the conservative members of the Supreme Court ruled (5-4) that the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution shall be deemed Incorporated under the 14th Amendment.
The text of the key element of the ruling is included below:

"(2)
A survey of the contemporaneous history also demonstratesclearly that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Framers and ratifiers counted the right to keep and bear arms among those fundamentalrights necessary to the Nation’s system of ordered liberty. Pp. 22–33.
(i)
By the 1850’s, the fear that the National Government would disarm the universal militia had largely faded, but the right to keepand bear arms was highly valued for self-defense. Abolitionist au-thors wrote in support of the right, and attempts to disarm “Free-Soilers” in “Bloody Kansas,” met with outrage that the constitutionalright to keep and bear arms had been taken from the people. After the Civil War, the Southern States engaged in systematic efforts todisarm and injure African Americans, see Heller, supra, at ___. These injustices prompted the 39th Congress to pass the Freedmen’s Bureau Act of 1866 and the Civil Rights Act of 1866 to protect theright to keep and bear arms. Congress, however, ultimately deemedthese legislative remedies insufficient, and approved the Fourteenth Amendment. Today, it is generally accepted that that Amendment was understood to provide a constitutional basis for protecting the rights set out in the Civil Rights Act. See General Building Contrac-tors Assn., Inc. v. Pennsylvania, 458 U. S. 375, 389. In Congressionaldebates on the proposed Amendment, its legislative proponents in the 39th Congress referred to the right to keep and bear arms as a fun-
Cite as: 561 U. S. ____ (2010) 5
Syllabus
damental right deserving of protection. Evidence from the periodimmediately following the Amendment’s ratification confirms thatthat right was considered fundamental. Pp. 22–31.

(ii)
Despite all this evidence, municipal respondents argue thatMembers of Congress overwhelmingly viewed §1 of the Fourteenth Amendment as purely an antidiscrimination rule. But while §1 does contain an antidiscrimination rule, i.e., the Equal Protection Clause,it can hardly be said that the section does no more than prohibit dis-crimination. If what municipal respondents mean is that the Second Amendment should be singled out for special—and specially unfavor-able—treatment, the Court rejects the suggestion. The right to keep and bear arms must be regarded as a substantive guarantee, not a prohibition that could be ignored so long as the States legislated inan evenhanded manner. Pp. 30–33.
JUSTICE ALITO, joined by THE CHIEF JUSTICE, JUSTICE SCALIA, and JUSTICE KENNEDY, concluded, in Parts II–C, IV, and V, that the Four-teenth Amendment’s Due Process Clause incorporates the SecondAmendment right recognized in Heller. Pp. 10–11, 33–44."

While I happen to agree the 2nd Amendment SHOULD be incorporated, what I am troubled by is that those who most vociferously argue against "judicial activism" including and especially the conservative members of the SCOTUS, are the very same who use words like "it can hardly be argued" when in fact it can most certainly be argued that the text is NOT PRESENT.
I remember quite clearly having one particular conservative commenter (pest is a better term for the conduct) ask and re-ask where in the Constitution it said we have "the right to..." (pick your interpretational right) because and precisely because no such words exist. It frankly seems as if those who object to governmental overreach and non-"constructionist" interpretation gladly put aside such concerns if their ox can be saved or their pet issue wins. It's not a surprise, but let's call a spade what it is, a spade. The "constructionist" judges ruled on interpretations and feelings from the 1850s and OVERRULED the attitudes of the former period (prior to the civil war) where we were not a federalized republic. In fact, in their ruling today, the justices put lie to many of the major complaints by conservatives, namely that extension of certain rights from the 14th has in fact absolutely been upheld by SCOTUS and that they, the most conservative justices, firmly agree. This repudiates the clamour from the right that the government is overreaching when it engages in equal protection cases like say, anti-discrimination vs. property rights, as one Dr. Rand Paul so often asserts.

Further, and also quite important, the court ALSO held that states/municipalities may in fact enact laws for protection of the public good so long as such laws do not prohibit hand-gun ownership or other firearm ownership, completely (this is consistent with the Presser case), but this extends it to handguns. While this isn't as monumental as incorporation, it refutes absolutely the claim of many that NO law is allowed, as has very very often been claimed. In fact, my key objection to incorporation was that doing so might, if not handled "carefully", lead to challenges to prohibitions on owning automatic weapons (for example) - for they certainly CAN be held to be necessary to arming an irregular militia. This decision puts that notion to rest (for now). Whether it gets challenged in the future is anyone's guess, but clearly the conservatives on the court saw the Pandora's box of problems they might well have otherwise opened.

I have not yet read the entire decision, but this is a monumental day in US history, it both categorically enforces the right to own arms AND gives the states the power to limit it. Little 'l' libertarians may see that such grants to the states can be abused, and they would be right in worrying, for what is in the common public safety good today may be far differently interpreted tomorrow.