How the National Rifle Association Changed the Meaning of the Second Amendment

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Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, is out with a new book, “The Second Amendment: A Biography,” which challenges certain popular assumptions.

In a review of Waldman’s tome, Joe Nocera of The New York Times notes that “of all the amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights, the Second was probably the least debated” by members of Congress.

Nocera quotes Waldman as follows: “Twelve congressmen joined the debate. None mentioned a private right to bear arms for self-defense, hunting or for any purpose other than joining the militia.” 


Nocera CONTINUES:

In time, of course, the militia idea died out, replaced by a professionalized armed service. Most gun regulation took place at the state and city level. The judiciary mostly stayed out of the way. In 1939, the Supreme Court upheld the nation’s first national gun law, the National Firearms Act, which put onerous limits on sawed-off shotguns and machine guns — precisely because the guns had no “reasonable relation” to “a well-regulated militia.”

But then, in 1977, there was a coup at the National Rifle Association, which was taken over by Second Amendment fundamentalists. Over the course of the next 30 years, they set out to do nothing less than change the meaning of the Second Amendment, so that it’s final phrase — “shall not be infringed” — referred to an individual right to keep and bear arms, rather than a collective right for the common defense.