American Dialogue: The Founders and Us

by Joseph J. Ellis

One wing of the conservative campaign to capture public opinion focused its efforts on the law schools. In the 1990s the NRA paid three lawyers nearly $1 million to write thirty articles for law reviews, all designed to generate an alternative body of legal scholarship. Unlike historical journals, where submissions must undergo peer review, law school publications are run by students, so there is no editorial screening provided by academic professionals in the field. The result was a new wave of legal and historical scholarship of dubious accuracy, multiple misquotations, and sometimes comical conclusions that its advocates began to call the “Standard Model.” The term described a set of shared historical distortions that soon began to invoke, then to celebrate, an unambiguous right to own guns.