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Article: Second reading: treating the Second Amendment as normal constitution law.
- Article from:
- Reason
- Article date:
- March 1, 1996
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1996 Reason Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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It has not been long since the Second Amendment moldered in the torpid backwaters of constitutional law studies. Swollen with materials pertaining to the Equal Protection Clause and the First Amendment, the leading law school casebooks of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s had little or nothing to say about the right of the people to keep and bear arms. Indeed, most such books had not so much as an index entry on the subject. In the entire 20th century the Supreme Court has not decided a single case concerning the states' power to regulate firearms, and in the past generation's political debates about gun control legislation, the Second Amendment has played a marginal and, one must ...