Pathway of Civil Rights
From an article by Glenn Harlan Reynolds that summarizes the latest civil rights struggle involving the right to keep and bear arms:
In 1995, Second Amendment scholarship had been almost entirely nonexistent for decades...
The Second Amendment, we were told, protected only the right of state militias (or as former Chief Justice Warren Burger characterized them, "state armies") to possess guns. Lower court opinions, to the extent they existed, were largely in agreement...
But then came a wave of scholarship, much of it by eminent constitutional scholars ...
By the turn of the millennium, it was well-established among scholars that the Second Amendment was intended to protect an individual right to arms, one that would be enforceable in court against infringements by states, municipalities and the federal government...
At present, we've reached the point where the Second Amendment can be characterized as ordinary constitutional law. That is, it now protects a right that attaches to individuals, and that those individuals can enforce in federal court...
America has more guns in private hands than ever before, even as crime rates fall, and, after a half-century or so of anti-gun hysteria, the nation seems to be reverting to its generally gun-friendly traditions.
Nothing is easy.
/fl