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How To Stop Worrying And Learn To Love The Second Amendment: A Reply To Professor Magarian, Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Scholarly Works

In response to Gregory Magarian's Speaking Truth to Firepower: How the First Amendment Destabilizes the Second, 91 Texas Law Review 49, 53-72 (2012), we argue first that the strict dichotomy he posits between an individual right to keep and bear arms aimed at deterring (and furnishing the means for ultimately opposing) governmental tyranny and a right securing the means for private self-defense is a false one. Further, we argue that, to the extent there is any tension between the First and Second Amendments, Heller and McDonald eased that tension by locating individual self-defense at the core of the right. Such …