A Good History of the Second Amendment

I remember reading The Brethren a few years ago, which is Bob Woodward's exceptional account of the Warren Burger court and all the landmark cases they tackled while he was Chief Justice. Some examples: access to abortion (Roe v. Wade), a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty (Furman v. Georgia), a rejection of Nixon's use of executive privilege in Watergate (United States v. Nixon), and, rather tragically, a condemnation of gay rights through the criminalization of sodomy (Bowers v. Hardwick). Those are the ones I remember, and of course, the range of topics extends well beyond that. What no history of the Supreme Court could include until 2008, however, was any case where the Court sought to—head on—define the parameters of the Second Amendment.

With gun violence in the United States being something of a state of emergency (with Baltimore breaking the record of killings per capita last year, there's certainly an interesting conversation to be had on how to address that state of emergency, and education spending—much more so than police spending—appears to be a key component of it), with the nearly unshakeable power of the gun lobby, and with a Supreme-Court-backed open-ended reading of what the Second Amendment actually protects, America doesn't appear to be on the cusp of reversing its relationship with guns.

This podcast does a wonderful job of tracing the history of the Amendment: from Madison's original words (his disrupting commas in those early clauses have been great headache causers), to the late-60s Black Panther movement, to the quiet coup in Cincinnati that overhauled the mission of the NRA almost overnight, to the District of Columbia v. Heller case that confirmed the protection of an individual (separate from a militia) to possess a firearm.

Well anyway ANYWAY. If your life is sorely missing an hour-long run-through of gun rights in America, HERE YOU ARE.