Despite Scalia’s professed methodology, we can also understand his opinion for the majority [in D.C. v. Heller] as an example of the modern understanding of the right to keep and bear arms, itself heavily influenced by the gun rights movement. Shortly after the Court decided Heller, Professor Reva Siegel described how “Heller’s originalism enforces understandings of the Second Amendment that were forged in the late twentieth century through popular constitutionalism.”
Professor [David] Cole similarly has argued that “the NRA almost certainly had more responsibility for the result in Heller than did ‘originalist’ theory.” Accounts of the NRA’s and other gun rights groups’ success in changing the Second Amendment narrative between the 1970s and Heller amply support these conclusions.
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