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The right to keep and bear arms is a lot like the right to freedom of speech. In each case, the Constitution expressly protects a liberty that needs to be insulated from the ordinary political process. Neither right, however, is absolute. The First Amendment, for example, has never protected perjury, fraud, or countless other crimes that are committed through the use of speech. Similarly, no reasonable person could believe that violent criminals should have unrestricted access to guns, or that any individual should possess a nuclear weapon.

Inevitably, courts must draw lines, allowing government to carry out its duty to preserve an orderly society, without unduly infringing the legitimate interests of individuals in expressing their thoughts and protecting themselves from criminal violence. This is not a precise science or one that will ever be free from controversy.

One judicial approach, however, should be unequivocally rejected. During the nineteenth century, courts routinely refused to invalidate restrictions on free speech that struck the judges as reasonable. This meant that speech got virtually no judicial protection. Government suppression of speech can usually be thought to serve some reasonable purpose, such as reducing social discord or promoting healthy morals. Similarly, most gun control laws can be viewed as efforts to save lives and prevent crime, which are perfectly reasonable goals. If thats enough to justify infringements on individual liberty, neither constitutional guarantee means much of anything.

During the twentieth century, the Supreme Court finally started taking the First Amendment seriously. Today, individual freedom is generally protected unless the government can make a strong case that it has a real need to suppress speech or expressive conduct, and that its regulations are tailored to that need. The legal doctrines have become quite complex, and there is room for disagreement about many of the Courts specific decisions. Taken as a whole, however, this body of case law shows what the Court can do when it appreciates the value of an individual right enshrined in the Constitution.

The Second Amendment also raises issues about which reasonable people can disagree. But if the Supreme Court takes this provision of the Constitution as seriously as it now takes the First Amendment, which it should do, there will be some easy issues as well.

District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) is one example. The right of the people protected by the Second Amendment is an individual right, just like the right[s] of the people protected by the First and Fourth Amendments. The Constitution does not say that the Second Amendment protects a right of the states or a right of the militia, and nobody offered such an interpretation during the Founding era. Abundant historical evidence indicates that the Second Amendment was meant to leave citizens with the ability to defend themselves against unlawful violence. Such threats might come from usurpers of governmental power, but they might also come from criminals whom the government is unwilling or unable to control.

McDonald v. City of Chicago (2010) was also an easy case under the Courts precedents. Most other provisions of the Bill of Rights had already been applied to the states because they are deeply rooted in this Nations history and tradition. The right to keep and bear arms clearly meets this test.

The text of the Constitution expressly guarantees the right to bear arms, not just the right to keep them. The courts should invalidate regulations that prevent law-abiding citizens from carrying weapons in public, where the vast majority of violent crimes occur. First Amendment rights are not confined to the home, and neither are those protected by the Second Amendment.

Nor should the government be allowed to create burdensome bureaucratic obstacles designed to frustrate the exercise of Second Amendment rights. The courts are vigilant in preventing government from evading the First Amendment through regulations that indirectly abridge free speech rights by making them difficult to exercise. Courts should exercise the same vigilance in protecting Second Amendment rights.

Some other regulations that may appear innocuous should be struck down because they are little more than political stunts. Popular bans on so-called assault rifles, for example, define this class of guns in terms of cosmetic features, leaving functionally identical semi-automatic rifles to circulate freely. This is unconstitutional for the same reason that it would violate the First Amendment to ban words that have a French etymology, or to require that French fries be called freedom fries.

In most American states, including many with large urban population centers, responsible adults have easy access to ordinary firearms, and they are permitted to carry them in public. Experience has shown that these policies do not lead to increased levels of violence. Criminals pay no more attention to gun control regulations than they do to laws against murder, rape, and robbery. Armed citizens, however, prevent countless crimes and have saved many lives. Whats more, the most vulnerable peopleincluding women, the elderly, and those who live in high crime neighborhoodsare among the greatest beneficiaries of the Second Amendment. If the courts require the remaining jurisdictions to stop infringing on the constitutional right to keep and bear arms, their citizens will be more free and probably safer as well.

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Interpretation: The Second Amendment | Constitution Center

The answer to that question is as old as the country itself, and it continues to evolve as Americans debate the right balance of individual freedom and public safety.

After every mass shooting and subsequent examination of gun violence statistics, a predictable argument is sure to follow as gun-rights advocates and gun-control advocates square off over what should be done next. Each side speaks with passion and fire about rights and law and the Constitution, the meaning of the right to bear arms and a well-regulated militia, and what these terms mean in the context of our Second Amendment rights.

But does anyone really know what those rights are? Even the experts cant say for certain because the Constitution is constantly being reviewed and reinterpreted. Some commonly held myths about the Constitution also cloud what we think we know about our rights, and that goes for our First Amendment rights as well as our Second.

A lot of people forget that the Supreme Court didnt recognize an individual right to own guns until 2008, says Adam Winkler, professor of Constitutional Law at UCLA and author of Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America. That was when the Court decided District of Columbia v. Heller. The 54 ruling found that the Second Amendment protects the individuals right to bear arms for self-defense, and overturned a Washington, D.C., law that prohibited people from keeping handguns in their homes.

Nowhere else in the Constitutiondoes the people refer to anything other than an individual right, the late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the majority. And thus the right to bear arms came to include the right of the individual to own a gun for protectionsomething that had never been articulated by the Supreme Court before.

RELATED: What Would It Take to Amend the Constitution?

The Constitution is a remarkably brief founding documentjust 7,591 words stretched over seven articles defining the authority invested in the government and 27 amendments generally laying out the rights retained by the people. Its brevity is both the beauty and the burden of the Constitution since it allows for interpretation in response to changing circumstances but also lacks specificity to easily settle disputes. When it comes to Second Amendment rights, the tension between these two traits is particularly sharp.

Heres what Second Amendment actually says: A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. That short sentence has sparked endless discussion and disagreement.

The gun debate has been going in circles for decades, and it certainly doesnt bring us together as a society, Winkler says, noting that absolutists on both extremes often drown out more moderate discussion. Nonetheless, he says its important to let every side be heard when deciding which policy to pursue: Thats what makes us a democracy.

RELATED: Interesting Facts and Figures About the Constitution

Another key part of democracy is its ability to adapt to new conditions and societal norms. As attitudes that were once thought of as perfectly natural become abhorrent in more enlightened times, the law can change to reflect that. The subject of race relations is a perfect example.

In the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court ruled that state-mandated racial segregation did not offend the Constitution. But in 1954, when civil rights advocates argued in Brown v. Board of Education that separate but equal was a fiction that legalized unconstitutional discrimination, a unanimous Supreme Court agreed. Government-sanctioned segregation was outlawed, in the North and the South, less than 60 years after Plessy.

That same changing dynamic could exist in the context of the Second Amendment. Will the next mass shooting change the hearts and minds of so many Americans that the right to own guns has to change to accommodate this new reality? Its possible. After all, its sometimes said amongst Constitutional scholars that all it takes to change the Constitution is the ability to count to five. In other words, can you get five Supreme Court justices to agree with what you think the Constitution means? Ultimately, the right to bear arms means what a majority of the Court says it means, and that can shift relatively quickly.

But the Courts respect for precedent and history is meant to prevent our fundamental rights from getting blown away too easily by political winds. Justices often look to the Founders struggle in crafting the Constitution for guidance.

RELATED: Why I No Longer Think Guns Are a God-Given Right

The gun control debate frequently focuses on what the Founders intended when they wrote the Second Amendment into the Bill of Rights, as the first 10 amendments are called. Was it so the people could take up arms to fight their own government gone tyrannical, or was the establishment of a well-regulated militia a way to discourage foreign threats? As Winkler and co-author Nelson Lund, a law professor at George Mason University, wrote for the non-partisan National Constitution Center, its a little of both.

While the Constitution and the amendments that would become the Bill of Rights were being debated in the earliest days of the republic, two factions emerged with very different views of what the new nation should look like. What would the relationship between the individual states and the federal government be? Should one be superior to the other? Who should have the firepower to maintain that balance?

States rights advocates, the Anti-Federalists, argued that the proposed Constitution would leave the states vulnerable to federal force, while pro-centralized-government Federalists responded that the people were armed and therefore not easily controlled by a federal army. But the lessons of the Revolutionary War showed that building an army was difficult and a ready militia was necessary for national defense.

Implicit in the debate between Federalists and Anti-Federalists were two shared assumptions, Winkler and Lund wrote. First, that the proposed new Constitution gave the federal government almost total legal authority over the army and militia. Second, that the federal government should not have any authority at all to disarm the citizenry.

RELATED: The Difference Between the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

But while the Federalists and Anti-Federalists were hashing out the right to bear arms, the states were already regulating who could own guns and how they could keep them, Winkler notes. In 1776, Massachusetts required an oath of loyalty to the Cause of America from anyone who wanted to own a gun, with Pennsylvania passing similar laws to disarm those disaffected by the fight for independence.

Even after the Second Amendment became law, states were in the business of deciding who could own and keep firearms. In slave states like Virginia, for example, African Americans, even freedmen, were barred from possessing weapons.

In 2016s Caetano v. Massachusetts, the Supreme Court extended the Second Amendment right to own weapons for self-defense to include all instruments that constitute bearable arms. But does that mean every individual has the right to own any weapon? The short answer is, no.

Like all of our rights, the Second Amendment is subject to commonsense restrictions, Winkler says.

Just as the First Amendment right to free speech doesnt protect perjury and the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination doesnt cover voluntary confessions, the individual right to own guns can be regulated without offending the Second Amendment, he says. The Court has approved laws preventing convicted felons and the mentally ill from owning guns, for instance, a position not considered controversial except by the most ardent gun advocates.

Except for the few who favor totally banning firearms on one end of the debate, and the few who favor completely unregulated weapons on the other, the vast majority of Americans fall somewhere in between. They favor reasonable laws targeted at keeping guns out of the most dangerous hands while recognizing law-abiding citizens right to own firearms for self-defense, hunting, and sport. According to a November 2020 Gallup poll, 91 percent of Americans want gun laws to be stricter or to stay as they are, while just 9 percent want looser regulations.

But Winkler says revoking or significantly changing the Second Amendment is highly unlikely. The truth is, there are only about 10 states with restrictive gun laws, he says, including Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey. Notably, California is known for the strictest regulations, and it also has the seventh-lowest rate of deaths by gun violence. Since it takes a super-majority of 38 states to repeal an amendment, and roughly 40 states are gun-friendly, Winkler says the Second Amendment is more likely to be amended to expand gun rights than revoke them. Instead, we will have to continue talking about it and trying to find the sweet spot where our right to individual security and public safety are in balance.

RELATED: Why Is It So Hard to Stop Gun Violence in America?

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What Is the Second Amendment? | Second Amendment Rights - Reader's Digest

Senate panel okays Tax Laws (Second Amendment) Bill: Fixed tax scheme gets nod to bring 2m retailers into tax net  The News International

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Senate panel okays Tax Laws (Second Amendment) Bill: Fixed tax scheme gets nod to bring 2m retailers into tax net - The News International

Iowa would have some of the most extensive gun rights guarantees in the nation under a constitutional amendment for voters to decide on Nov. 8.

Why it matters: A "yes" vote would mean all gun restrictions under the Iowa amendment would be subject to "strict scrutiny," the highest legal hurdle for legislation to clear if challenged in court.

Catch up fast: Iowa is one of six states that doesn't recognize Second Amendment rights in its state constitution.

What they're saying: The proposal goes much further than the Second Amendment, placing gun access ahead of safety and potentially blocking policies that limit them in places like school settings, Connie Ryan, executive director of Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, tells Axios.

Of note: Amendments like the one proposed in Iowa have only been adopted by three states Alabama, Louisiana, and Missouri and each was approved between eight and 10 years ago according to research published by the Iowa Law Review.

Yes, but: Gun rights advocates have already succeeded via a U.S. Supreme Court decision in June that struck down New York's concealed carry law, Richard Rogers, a board member of the Iowa Firearms Coalition, told Axios.

The intrigue: Both sides tell Axios they believe public opinion is generally on their side.

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Iowa residents to vote on adding gun rights amendment to state constitution - Axios

In 2015, as Tony was testifying about an upcoming bill, he realized he was the only black pro-Second Amendment representative out of over 100 people. He wanted to see more representation from his community. How could he encourage minorities to not only exercise their Second Amendment rights but to get involved in advocating for them?

Tony felt a deep need to destroy negative media-driven stereotypes, but how? When he spoke with a friend about this, his friend gave him the answer he needed but didnt want at the time. He told Tony it was on him to start the movement. He needed to be about it, not talk about it.

And so began the 2A4E Diversity Shoot. According to Tony, Our mission is to introduce all people, regardless of race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, or background to learn about their Second Amendment rights.

The event started small in 2015 with only four people attending. Tony partnered with local gun ranges and kept showing up. Between 2015-2019 the event grew so large he had to start using tickets to avoid capacity issues. Eventually, he spread out to other ranges and added more dates. Even throughout the pandemic, Tony found ranges that continued to host. These days, Tony continues to be about it and hosts events twice a month at four ranges and in two states.

As Tony and I chatted about the issues surrounding the gun community, the common theme that came up was divisiveness. Whether it be political rhetoric, false media narratives, or in-fighting, everything seems to be aimed at separating gun owners into different groups. Of course, we all fall into certain categories and come from different backgrounds, but what does that matter if we all agree on the right to bear arms?

We agreed that the hardcore anti-gun crowd is exceptionally united. Theyre on a mission to eradicate guns, and theyll stick together no matter what. They dont want anyone to have guns regardless of gender, race, political affiliation, or other qualifications.

Its not likely well change the minds in that group, but what if we could get to those people in the middle? The ones who are uneducated about firearms and havent chosen a side yet. Certainly, some people have no gun experience, but theyre curious and just waiting for the right conversation.

As Tony and I discussed solutions, it became clear we need two things: unity and more people on our side. We need to have conversations that arent pushy or judgmental, and we must welcome everyone into the 2A community, regardless of how we feel about them.

Thats precisely what Tony Simon is doing. Hes created a safe space designed to be welcoming to everyone, including minorities and underrepresented groups who may often feel comfortable in a firearms class. Tony doesnt care if youre black, white, Asian, gay, straight, or anything else. Youre welcome at the 2A4E Diversity Shoot. As a woman who initially felt intimidated to go to the range, I can say, after talking to Tony, I would have loved to attend his class.

Tony Simons mission is to help people learn about and exercise their Second Amendment rights. Its a human right, after all, he says. His work focuses on showing people that gun laws dont make us any safer and gun owners arent crazy for wanting to protect themselves.

2A4E isnt just a brand or catchy phrase. Its a lifestyle we all, as gun owners, should be living without question. To preserve and restore our rights, we need to unite and invite more people to our side. The best way to do that is to embrace everyone, show them what the Second Amendment truly stands for, and welcome them into our community.

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Growing the 2A Community: The Second Amendment Is for Everyone - Guns.com