Americans embrace guns: Column
Despite anti-gun hysteria following shootings, the trend is toward expanding gun rights.
This past weekend, the Tennessee Law Review held a symposium on "New Frontiers in the Second Amendment." It was a follow-up, of sorts, to a symposium held almost 20 years ago, and boy, has a lot changed since then.
In 1995, Second Amendment scholarship had been almost entirely nonexistent for decades, and what little there was (mostly written by lobbyists for gun-control groups) treated the matter as open-and-shut: The Second Amendment, we were told, protected only the right of state militias (or as former Chief Justice Warren Burger characterized them, "state armies") to possess guns. Lower court opinions, to the extent they existed, were largely in agreement, and the political discussion, such as it was, generally held that anyone who believed that the Second Amendment might embody a judicially enforceable right for ordinary citizens to possess guns was a shill — probably paid — for the NRA. Whatever the Second Amendment meant, it did not, we were told, protect a right of individuals to possess firearms, enforceable in court against governmental entities that infringed on individuals' gun possession.
But then came a wave of scholarship, much of it by eminent constitutional scholars ranging from William Van Alstyne, to Laurence Tribe, to Sanford Levinson, to Robert Cottrol, exploring the original purposes and understanding of the Second Amendment. By the turn of the millennium, it was well-established among scholars that the Second Amendment was intended to protect an individual right to arms, one that would be enforceable in court against infringements by states, municipalities and the federal government.
And, with the decisions in District of Columbia v. Heller and McDonald v. Chicago, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed. The Heller decision struck down the District of Columbia's draconian gun-control law, while McDonald made clear that the Second Amendment protected not only against federal incursions into gun rights (the District of Columbia is a federal enclave) but also to infringements involving states and municipalities. Subsequent lower court cases, like Moore v. Madigan and Peruta v. San Diego, have held that the Second Amendment supports not only a right to keep a gun in one's home for self-protection, but also a right to carry a gun in public for self-defense. The details are still being hammered out, but the right is no longer in question.
