Although I would guess that Sonia Sotomayor is not a big fan of Second Amendment protections, I think my co-blogger Dave Kopel is reading too much into Maloney v. Cuomo. Kopel writes that the judges in that case

seriously misconstrue the Second Amendment itself, when they write: "The Supreme Court recently held that this confers an individual right on citizens to keep and bear arms." To the contrary, as the Supreme Court explained at length in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Second Amendment does not "confer" any right; the right to arms pre-exists the Constitution. The Second Amendment protects but does not create that pre-existing right.

  I'm puzzled by the idea that merely using the word "confer" is somehow a "serious" misreading of DC v. Heller, given that it is the exact word that the Heller decision twice uses to state what the Second Amendment does. From Scalia's majority opinion, 128 S.Ct. 2783 at 2799:

There seems to us no doubt, on the basis of both text and history, that the Second Amendment conferred an individual right to keep and bear arms.

And at page 2814:

This holding is not only consistent with, but positively suggests, that the Second Amendment confers an individual right to keep and bear arms (though only arms that "have some reasonable relationship to the preservation or efficiency of a well regulated militia").

The additional fact that Maloney v. Cuomo is a per curiam decision, and thus may not have been written by Sotomayor at all, suggests to me that David is reading too much into the decision for insight into Sotomayor's views on the Second Amendment.