It hasn’t gotten very much play in the media (which I don’t understand), but according to yesterday’s decision by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, citizens have the right to challenge state and local laws that restrict our Second Amendment rights.

You read that right. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, by far the most liberal of the circuits, restricted the power of states and local municipalities to interfere with our right to keep and bear arms.

Even more surprising, the judges went out of their way to make their case. While the ruling upheld an Alameda County law that barred anyone other than law enforcement from possessing a gun on county property — basically banning gun shows from the county’s fairgrounds — it marks the first time a federal court has incorporated the Second Amendment into the extension of our individual rights found in the 14th Amendment.

The ruling follows and extends the U.S. Supreme Court’s Heller decision of last year, which shot down Washington, D.C.’s ban on all handguns. And the court makes a stronger case for the Second Amendment than any gun advocate I’ve heard.

The three judges of the Ninth who ruled unanimously in this case, Nordyke v. King, found that because the right to bear arms is a fundamental right, for a state to deny us that right would violate the due process clause of the 14th Amendment.

Though the 43-page ruling was issued on an unfortunate day — the 10-year anniversary of the Columbine High School massacre — it lays out the case for the individual right to bear arms based on our nation’s history and the need to maintain an armed citizenry to combat enemies foreign and domestic. Here’s Judge Diarmuid O’Scannlain writing the main opinion:

We therefore conclude that the right to keep and bear arms is “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition.”

Colonial revolutionaries, the Founders, and a host of commentators and lawmakers living during the first one hundred years of the Republic all insisted on the fundamental nature of the right.

It has long been regarded as the “true palladium of liberty.” Colonists relied on it to assert and to win their independence, and the victorious Union sought to prevent a recalcitrant South from abridging it less than a century later.

The crucial role this deeply rooted right has played in our birth and history compels us to recognize that it is indeed fundamental, that it is necessary to the Anglo-American conception of ordered liberty that we have inherited.

We are therefore persuaded that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment incorporates the Second Amendment and applies it against the states and local governments.

In a concurring opinion, Circuit Judge Ronald Gould writes further:

First, as Judge O’Scannlain has aptly explained, the rights secured by the Second Amendment are “deeply rooted in this Nation’s history and tradition,” and “necessary to the Anglo-American regime of ordered liberty.” The salient policies underlying the protection of the right to bear arms are of inestimable importance. The right to bear arms is a bulwark against external invasion. We should not be overconfident that oceans on our east and west coasts alone can preserve security. We recently saw in the case of the terrorist attack on Mumbai that terrorists may enter a country covertly by ocean routes, landing in small craft and then assembling to wreak havoc. That we have a lawfully armed populace adds a measure of security for all of us and makes it less likely that a band of terrorists could make headway in an attack on any community before more professional forces arrived.

Second, the right to bear arms is a protection against the possibility that even our own government could degenerate into tyranny, and though this may seem unlikely, this possibility should be guarded against with individual diligence.

Third, while the Second Amendment thus stands as a protection against both external threat and internal tyranny, the recognition of the individual’s right in the Second Amendment, and its incorporation by the Due Process Clause against the states, is not inconsistent with the reasonable regulation of weaponry. All weapons are not “arms” within the meaning of the Second Amendment, so, for example, no individual could sensibly argue that the Second Amendment gives them a right to have nuclear weapons or chemical weapons in their home for self-defense. Also, important governmental interests will justify reasonable regulation of rifles and handguns, and the problem for our courts will be to define, in the context of particular regulation by the states and municipalities, what is reasonable and permissible and what is unreasonable and offensive to the Second Amendment.

So there you have it. The Ninth Circuit, of all courts, making the same argument in favor of the right to bear arms that the NRA and gun-rights advocates have been making for years.

This ruling will open a can of worms — exactly what limits states can impose on the Second Amendment aren’t explained, so we’ll see more cases coming up begging for clarification. But now citizens have the right to challenge the laws that would be in question.

It’s also unclear where this case goes from here. It would be up to the gun show organizers to appeal, since the court did uphold the Alameda County law. I don’t see how the county would get a hearing if it appealed, since it won.

But we can guess as to what the U.S. Supreme Court would say, especially after Heller and looking back at previous cases involving the Second Amendment — the court has consistently ruled that the phrase “the people” in the Second Amendment has the same meaning as it does in the First, Fourth, Ninth and Tenth Amendments (check out U.S. v. Verdugo-Urguidez, 1990).

There’s also the chance the entire Ninth Circuit could review the ruling (it was heard by a three-judge panel consisting of one Reagan appointee, one Carter appointee and one Clinton appointee), but that’s unlikely.

Of course, none of this would preclude the Department of Homeland Security from putting all law-abiding Second Amendment advocates on a watch list.