Second Amendment

Government, wrote Alexander Hamilton, should substitute “the mild influence” of the law for “the violent and sanguinary agency of the sword.”

It's a myth that the Founders opposed the regulation of deadly weapons.

Its text and context don’t ensure an unlimited individual right to bear any kind and number of weapons by anyone.

The real history of the Second Amendment.

The Founders never intended to create an unregulated individual right to a gun.

A case of 18th-century politicking has stymied our ability to deal with a 21st-century crisis.

One nation, under the gun.

What gun regulations meant to the founders, and why the Black Panthers are the true pioneers of today's pro-gun movement.

Was the 2008 Heller decision a victory for originalism or a living Constitution?

A challenge to the "Standard Model" scholars who hold that the Second Amendment protects individual gun rights.

America’s favorite gun.

In a recent Supreme Court oral argument about disarming domestic abusers, originalism itself was put to the test.

Originalism is all the rage on the right, but a gun case at the Supreme Court is exposing its absurdity—even to the conservative justices.

The fear that overtook us that day in 1988 was unfamiliar to most Americans. Now all too many know how it feels.

Gun control is actually an American tradition.

The conservative Supreme Court's favorite judicial philosophy requires a very, very firm grasp of history — one that none of the justices seem to possess.

The Court’s striking down of a New York gun law relies on a fundamentally anti-democratic historical record that excludes women and people of color.

The rise of tactical gun culture among civilians reveals a new front in the U.S. battle against nativist authoritarianism.

Like the 1619 Project, two new books on the Constitution reflect a vigorous debate about what has changed in the American past—and what hasn’t.

A conversation between a historian and the creator of a new documentary short about NRA leader Harlon Carter.