In the New York Times this morning, Bret Stephens called for a repeal of the Second Amendment. Setting aside the fact that this is about as likely to occur as Donald Trump winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, is this a goal worth pursuing? I fear that it distracts from an understanding of how we got to our current situation—and what can realistically be done about it.

Despite claims of originalists, the Second Amendment has been radically remade by the courts in the past decade, just as much as has the law of marriage. What exactly the Amendment means has been the subject of much scholarly debate and textual analysis, chiefly around the meaning of the words “A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State.” This phrase precedes the actual restriction on regulation, but what does it mean? Does it modify the restriction, or is it just flowery language to justify it? Does it mean that gun ownership should somehow be tied to militia membership? Or that the right is a collective right of the people but not individual? Individuals have always enjoyed the right to use guns for self-defense, but does this mean no limitations are allowed?

Whatever the founders meant, the Supreme Court had never struck down a local gun restriction as being unreasonable until the 2008 case of Heller v. D.C., which held that the right was individual and unconnected to either militia service or self-defense. In 2010, the Court extended this interpretation of the Second Amendment to apply to the states in McDonald v. City of Chicago. Before that, we enjoyed a long history of reasonable, safety-oriented regulations of firearms, and yet somehow remained free of totalitarianism or foreign invasion.

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