By John Brummett

Only because of guns might Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court give heartburn to the two Democratic senators from Arkansas.

Guns very nearly define the political attitudes of rural Arkansas, though race and religion enter into them as well. But the first thing a politician does not want to get on the wrong side of in rural Arkansas is a critical mailing from the National Rifle Association.

Now, fortuitously, and all of a sudden, any of Mark Pryor’s and Blanche Lincoln’s fears ought to be allayed.

Sotomayor turns out to be allied with leading conservative judges on guns. It appears clear that she prefers to interpret law, not make it, which is what the right-wingers always say they want, though that’s not what they always mean.

Here’s the issue: It’s long been argued whether the 2nd Amendment, with its right to bear arms, applies to a well-organized militia or to everyone, and whether, if applying to everyone, it means government can’t limit the weaponry the private citizen chooses to assemble.

So the U.S. Supreme Court got to settle that — after a fashion — in an appeal of a challenge to the anti-gun ordinance of Washington, D.C.

The rightward court found by 5-to-4 that the 2nd Amendment expressly grants a right to keep arms at home for self-defense and that D.C.’s ordinance was unconstitutional and invalid.

Naturally, that finding caused cases to start percolating through federal district courts and up to the district appeals courts against assorted restrictions by state or local governments on guns.

One of those, Maloney vs. Cuomo, challenged the state of New York’s ban on a certain martial arts weapon. That case went to the district appeals court in Manhattan on which Sotomayor sits.

She joined without individual comment a unanimous ruling of her fellow judges dismissing the challenge, saying the D.C. case expressly limited its application to the federal government, of which the incorporated area of D.C. is a part.

Her appeals circuit said it was bound by that precedent not to extend that interpretation, because only the Supreme Court had the “prerogative of over-ruling its own decisions.”

That’s called following the law, not making it. It’s called judicial inactivism. It what’s conservatives always say they want, but sometimes don’t.

Meantime, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals got a similar case and presumed to apply the D. C. precedent and declare that gun ownership could not be restricted by state or local governments.

So we confront conflicting appeals court rulings, which is not uncommon, because — guess what? — judges vary because they bring different kinds of experience to different kinds of rulings.

Now the whole shebang is on appeal to the Supreme Court, raising the possibility that Sotomayor might soon be ruling on herself, although she probably wouldn’t, but would disqualify herself.

Gun advocacy groups have been crying out that Sotomayor’s signing that Maloney ruling in New York meant she did not believe in the right to bear arms. They have been sounding a phony alarm that she would allow state and local jurisdictions to take guns right out of people’s hands.

Again, all she did, was sign a ruling with other judges saying the Supreme Court’s case law is narrow at this point and that she and her other district appeals court judges were not going to be the ones to presume to broaden it.

That brings us to what happened Tuesday.

Yet another gun-restriction case got appealed, this one from Chicago and its suburb of Oak Park. It went to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals, which, significantly, is dominated by right-wing judges favored, even adored, by conservatives.

In a ruling written by conservative chief judge Frank H. Easterbrook and signed by, among others, acclaimed conservative judge Richard A. Posner, the 7th Circuit said it could not overturn the local gun restriction.

That’s because, these conservative judges wrote, “we agree with Maloney,” meaning the ruling by Sotomayor’s district, that the only applicable precedent so far from the Supreme Court applied only to the federal government.

In other words, anybody getting an anti-Sotomayor mailing from a gun advocacy group needs to be aware her position is that same conservative one issued by some of the most eminent and acclaimed right-wing judges in the country.

Most likely the Supreme Court is going to rule 5-to-4 that the right to bear arms restricts state and local governments, with or without Sotomayor. But it hasn’t yet, which is all that she and a nest of right-wing judicial allies are saying.

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John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.