Law Commons^™

For many years following the Supreme Court's decision in United States v. Miller,1 the orthodox opinion among academics and federal appeals courts alike was that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution did not protect possession of firearms unrelated to service in the lawfully established militia. 2 In recent decades, a growing chorus of polemicists, gun rights advocates, single-topic academics, and famously contrarian and exceedingly clever constitutional theorists (Sandy Levinson, Akhil Amar, Larry Tribe, and Randy Barnett among others) have challenged this old understanding on originalist grounds related to both the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.3 While the once dominant …

If commentators on the Second Amendment agree about anything at all, it is only that disputants parsing the meaning and importance of the constitutional right to arms cannot avoid involvement in a larger cultural war (and this is the term almost everyone employs)I over the meaning and importance (vel non) of gun ownership to the American psyche and soul. Almost every scholar discussed in this short, inexhaustive review of recent literature calls for reasoned moderation (the other calls for well armed chaos),2 but most writers in the field, including this one, and including those who neither own nor wish the …