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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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<\/a>) notes the rise of a consensus among liberal <\/em>legal scholars that the Second Amendment “right of the people” to keep and bear arms actually does <\/em>refer to “the people” as individuals:<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n 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<\/font><\/a>.<\/p>\n Laurence H. Tribe<\/font><\/a>, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Tribe’s switch in allegiance – in the mid-nineties – was a huge victory for pro-liberty forces.<\/p>\n \u201cMy conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,\u201d Professor Tribe said. \u201cI have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n An honest liberal lawyer.\u00a0 Good to see they exist.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 The Times <\/em>piece notes Levinson’s article:<\/p>\n 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 \u201cThe Embarrassing Second Amendment<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe Levinson piece was very much a turning point,\u201d said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. \u201cHe was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.\u201d<\/p>\n In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as \u201can A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n