The most controversial part of the law was the ban on homeowner possession. The ban was absolute, not a simple limit on the number of guns you could buy or the purpose for which they might have been acquired (including self-defense).
And while you can understand the motivation behind the law, especially in a city so violent it used to make Philadelphia look bucolic in comparison, the constitutional flaw for its critics was obvious: If the Second Amendment had any meaning whatsoever, there had to be, in the words of Justice Scalia, "a strong presumption that the Second Amendment right is exercised individually and belongs to all Americans."
Of course, not everyone feels that way. Many people, including most anti-gun activists, think that even though the text of the amendment is indisputable, the meaning is far from clear.
They argue that the Founding Fathers were really talking about militias, living as they had in a time when the citizen farmers of the colonies became the army of the revolution.
They knew that law-abiding homeowners needed to be able to grab the nearest musket and protect themselves from tyrannt and invasion. They also knew that an unarmed populace was vulnerable to all sorts of governmental mischief. It's all about context.
Interestingly, many of the same anti-gun liberals don't care very much about context when dealing with the Fourth Amendment, which protects against arbitrary searches and also had the Brits in mind.
In an amazing leap of logic, they used the Fourth to help develop a very squishy right to privacy, which then led to our even squishier right to "reproductive freedom."
But bring on that context when it comes to the Second.
