The good news: Gun Control as a major political vote-mover is pretty much not only dead, but has reversed on itself to become a Social Security-level Third Rail. Nationwide as well as in Minnesota, only the most hardened, defeat-proof Metrocrats dare propose anything to do with gun control, and then only as a flag-showing exercise.
Conservatives have led both the moral, ethical, legal and practical pushes for defeating gun control and un-doing the four decades of damage it has caused.
But behind the self-assurance one gets when one knows one is aboard an utterly righteous cause was the nagging realization that victory couldn’t really be consolidated until the other guys – the people who’d been causing all that trouble – really believed it too.
As I was noting in the days a decade before blogs became a household term, the sea was starting to change in the early nineties. And today – via Powerline – I notice that one of the last ramparts of orthodox gun-control is falling to the peasants; the NYTimes, the most reliable media proponent of gun control (published by Arthur Sulzberger, holder of a New York City concealed carry permit) notes the rise of a consensus among liberal legal scholars that the Second Amendment “right of the people” to keep and bear arms actually does refer to “the people” as individuals:
There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.
In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.
Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.
Tribe’s switch in allegiance – in the mid-nineties – was a huge victory for pro-liberty forces.
“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”
An honest liberal lawyer. Good to see they exist.
The piece notes the contributions of Akil Reed Amar and, especially (for me) Sanford Levinson in starting the slow swing in the legal left’s perception of the issue. The Times piece notes Levinson’s article:
In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”
“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”
In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”
The article – which is a fairly dense read for a layperson and a modestly-accessible read for legal scholarship – hit the anti-gunners’ stances like a pugil stick hitting a kitten.
And it still does:
Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.
“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”
Appeals to “lack of sexiness” don’t carry a lot of legal, ethical or moral weight, do they?
The Times piece sums up much of the legal history of both sides of the movement, and is well worth a read, especially as we lead up to the possible hearing of the Parker case – the tossing of the DC gun ban – in the Supreme Court:
Filing [the Parker suit] in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.
“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.
Levy, the suit, and the sea change in even liberal outlook are battling a four-decade encrustation of ignorance:
Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.
“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”
Question, Ms. Singer: How many of those murders were carried out by people with no criminal records?
Get back to me on that.
Tribe:
Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”
I’ll be watching.
Champagne may be in order.
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