The Heller case quickly found a powerful opponent in the National Rifle Association. This surprises nearly every layman I discuss the case with, most of whom assume the NRA was behind the lawsuit in the first place. The Parker lawyers received backroom visits from allies of the NRA before their case was filed, discouraging them from going forward. The Supreme Court (which still had Sandra Day O’Conner back then) would not reliably deliver a victory, they argued, and an authoritative statement from the Supremes that the Second Amendment did not protect an individual right could prove devastating to the long-term cause.

This was an intellectually respectable objection, the Levy team thought, but ultimately too fearful. If no one would fight for the Second Amendment qua Second Amendment in a relevant case, then its supposed paladins were as complicit in its irrelevance as were the most rabid partisans for the idea that the Second Amendment only applied to militias and is thus a dead letter.

“The second problem the NRA had with our case was territorial,” Gura says. “They didn’t want something like this going on that they didn’t have their hands in.” In fact, in April 2003, less than two months from Parker’s filing in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a new lawsuit challenging D.C.’s gun laws, Seegars v. Ashcroft, was filed with the backing of the NRA and its longtime Second Amendment legal eagle Stephen Halbrook in charge.

As per then-standard NRA practice, Halbrook offered the court a menu of options to choose from to overthrow D.C. gun laws, hoping one of them might work even if a direct Second Amendment challenge did not. Among them were claims that Congress had only empowered D.C. to create for itself regulations that were “usual and reasonable,” and that D.C.’s gun laws, being the most severe ones in the nation, were therefore unusual and unreasonable.

Unlike the Levy team, Halbrook and the NRA chose to sue not only Washington, D.C., but the U.S. Department of Justice. The DOJ is a significantly more formidable opponent than the District of Columbia. To add insult to injury, because of their unease with Levy and his comparatively inexperienced crew, the NRA team used Seegars as an excuse to try to scuttle Parker altogether by taking over the case, through the legal gambit of “consolidation.” That’s when two cases that are asking courts to decide on essentially the same matter can be combined, whether or not one of the parties really wants it—a hostile takeover of the litigation, as it were. The consolidation request, made to the court in April 2003, was denied.

Then in January 2004, at the D.C. District Court, all but one Seegars plaintiff—a woman with a registered shotgun contesting the trigger-lock aspect of D.C.’s laws—were denied standing. The last remaining plaintiff lost the case on a basic “doesn’t belong to a militia” argument. The Seegars team appealed, bringing their case into the appeals process before Parker had even been considered at the District Court. It wasn’t until March 31, 2004 that that court dismissed Parker, basically on the grounds that those plaintiffs weren’t in a militia, either. The Levy team expected this initial loss, but appealed, determined to fight the case all the way through the appeals process.

Because the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the issues in both cases were essentially the same, they halted the appeals progress of Parker, at D.C.’s request, pending resolution of Seegars. Then in a February 2005 decision, Seegars was wrecked on the rock of standing, for D.C. Circuit-specific peculiarities explained further below.

The NRA also harmed Parker through its decision to bring DOJ into the case. The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, in coming down with its Parker decision on March 9, 2007, booted five of the original plaintiffs off the case, for the same reason of standing that the five Seegars plaintiffs were all tossed away. The standing argument had been introduced to the case by the Justice Department; D.C. hadn’t thought of it on its own.

After some hesitation—causing it to miss the initial filing deadline—the District of Columbia appealed to the Supreme Court. The NRA was simultaneously pushing a new federal law that would have mooted the newly renamed Heller case by overturning the city’s anti-gun laws. Levy lobbied against the measure, arguing that a Supreme Court victory would be more permanent and more important to the whole country than just overturning D.C.’s restrictions. That bill did not pass in 2007, and the Heller case was taken up by the Supreme Court in November of that year. Only at that point, after years of obstruction, did the NRA became highly cooperative, putting together a significant amicus brief endorsed by the majority of both houses of Congress and by Vice President Dick Cheney.

Quoted:
RBG probably thinks its rational for states to ban lethal weapons but that it goes to far to prohibit non-lethals. She doesn't care what the 2nd meant to the founders.

Quoted:
I haven't read Caetano recently,

...
The en banc court's decision to limit its review towhether the Second Amendment protects the right to
concealed carryas opposed to the more general right to
public carrywas untenable. Most fundamentally, it was
not justified by the terms of the complaint, which called
into question the State's regulatory scheme as a whole.

...

This Court has already suggested that the Second Amendment protects
the right to carry firearms in public in some fashion. As
we explained in Heller, to "bear arms" means to "'wear,
bear, or carry upon the person or in the clothing or in a
pocket, for the purpose of being armed and ready for
offensive or defensive action in a case of conflict with another
person.'" 554 U. S., at 584 (quoting Muscarello v. United
States, 524 U. S. 125, 143 (1998) (GINSBURG, J., dissenting); alterations
and some internal quotation marks omitted).
The most natural reading of this definition encompasses public carry.
I find it extremely improbable that
the Framers understood the Second Amendment to protect
little more than carrying a gun from the bedroom to the
kitchen.

...

Finally, the Second Amendment's core purpose further
supports the conclusion that the right to bear arms extends to public carry. The Court in Heller emphasized
that "self-defense" is "the central component of the [Second
Amendment] right itself." 554 U. S., at 599. This purpose
is not limited only to the home, even though the need for
self-defense may be "most acute" there. Id., at 628. "Selfdefense has to take place wherever the person happens to
be," and in some circumstances a person may be more
vulnerable in a public place than in his own house. Volokh, Implementing the Right To Keep and Bear Arms for
Self-Defense: An Analytical Framework and a Research
Agenda, 56 UCLA L. Rev. 1443, 1515 (2009).
...

stake.
The Court's decision to deny certiorari in this case reflects a distressing trend: the treatment of the Second
Amendment as a disfavored right. See Friedman v. Highland Park, 577 U. S. ___, ___ (2015) (THOMAS, J., dissenting from denial of certiorari) (slip op., at 6) ("The Court's
refusal to review a decision that flouts two of our Second
Amendment precedents stands in marked contrast to the
Court's willingness to summarily reverse courts that
disregard our other constitutional decisions"); Jackson v.
City and County of San Francisco, 576 U. S. ___, ___
(2015) (same). The Constitution does not rank certain
rights above others, and I do not think this Court should
impose such a hierarchy by selectively enforcing its preferred rights. Id., at ___ (slip op., at 1) ("Second Amendment rights are no less protected by our Constitution than
other rights enumerated in that document"). The Court
has not heard argument in a Second Amendment case in
over seven yearssince March 2, 2010, in McDonald v.
Chicago, 561 U. S. 742.

...

For those of us who work in marbled halls, guarded
constantly by a vigilant and dedicated police force, the
guarantees of the Second Amendment might seem antiquated and superfluous. But the Framers made a clear
choice: They reserved to all Americans the right to bear
arms for self-defense. I do not think we should stand by
idly while a State denies its citizens that right, particularly
when their very lives may depend on it. I respectfully
dissent.