Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History

by Kurt Andersen

When the ban on semiautomatic weapons expired in 2004, it was not renewed. Even more amazingly, what Chief Justice Burger had denounced as a fraud in the 1990s had become respectable jurisprudence by the 2000s. In cases in 2008 and 2010, the Supreme Court finally agreed to decide the fundamental meaning of the Second Amendment. Four of the justices still interpreted it the old way. In the 2010 case, for instance, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote an opinion noting that back in 1791, “the Framers did not write the Second Amendment in order to protect a private right of armed self defense. There has been, and is, no consensus that the right is, or was, ‘fundamental.’ ” But in both cases, five justices went with the new reading. Now our Constitution does indeed guarantee each one of us the right to own firearms. We can argue all we want about how different guns were in the 1790s, when it took a minute to fire three shots, and about the correlation between the numbers of guns and gun deaths in the contemporary world, and how Australia’s 1996 roundup program worked. Those debates are academic, however. In this instance, the Constitution apparently is a suicide pact, and not just metaphorically. So that’s how we got here. The NRA has won. Yet they and their compatriots seem no less paranoid or angry, still convinced that tyranny is right around the corner and that federal agents are coming for their guns. The wholesale confiscation of guns was never seriously bruited in the United St...