There’s a lecture posted on The Volokh Conspiracy that describes the restoration of the Second Amendment during my lifetime. The right to bear arms was almost eliminated under Johnson and Nixon, after being seriously hammered during Roosevelt’s administration.
The article includes this statement: “The U.S. Supreme Court decisions of District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008 and McDonald v. Chicago in 2010 were the opposite of cutting edge. Those decisions were lagging indicators. They were the long-term consequence of elections, of a generation of historical scholarship, and of the refusal of millions of ordinary people to accept that a right they had always exercised and cherished could be defined out of existence by unreasoned pronouncements.” I had never looked at Heller and McDonald in this light.
The article is available at https://reason.com/volokh/2026/11/10/the-peaceful-second-amendment-revolution/ It is definitely worth the time it takes to read it.
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