Supreme Court’s Silence Clouds Gun Control Debate: New at Reason

This month’s mass shooting at a high school in Florida has predictably provoked demands for new restrictions on guns, most of which are dubious on practical grounds, constitutional grounds, or both. But while logic and experience can help us figure out which measures are likely to be effective, the debate about which ones are consistent with the Second Amendment occurs in a shadowland only partly illuminated by the Supreme Court.

In the decade since the Court officially recognized the individual right to armed self-defense, Jacob Sullum notes, it has passed up one opportunity after another to clarify the boundaries of that right. “The right to keep and bear arms is apparently this Court’s constitutional orphan,” Justice Clarence Thomas observed last week as the Court declined to hear yet another Second Amendment case.

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