WaPo analysis takes a closer look at 'how the Second Amendment was reinterpreted to protect individual rights'

Sarah D | 2:11 PM on May 31, 2022

Last week, the Washington Post’s Marc Fisher reminded us that the AR-15 was “invented for Nazi infantrymen” in the late 1950s, many years after the end of World War II.

So, given their apparently very tenuous grasp of relatively recent history, it should come as no surprise that WaPo staff writer Amber Phillips would get 18th-century American history so spectacularly wrong:

How the Second Amendment was reinterpreted to protect individual rights https://t.co/mNjSBr1ccN

— Post Politics (@postpolitics) May 31, 2022

Of course this would be considered an “analysis” at the Washington Post:

But historians say that the notion that the amendment protects people’s right to have guns for self-defense is a relatively recent reading of the Constitution, born out of a conservative push in the 1980s and ’90s. (Twitchy editor’s note: “Historians say.” Gotta love it when they bust that one out!)

The text of the Second Amendment reads: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” The historical consensus is that, for most of American history, the amendment was understood to concern the use of guns in connection with militia service. The Founding Fathers were likely focused on keeping state militias from being disarmed, said Joseph Blocher, who specializes in the Second Amendment at Duke University’s law school.

“An individual’s right to use guns in self-defense is not expressly written in the Constitution,” said Reva Siegel, a law professor at Yale who has written prominent law review articles on the subject.

The interpretation that the Second Amendment extends to individuals’ rights to own guns only became mainstream in 2008, when the Supreme Court ruled in a landmark gun case, District of Columbia vs. Heller, that Americans have a constitutional right to own guns in their homes, knocking down the District’s handgun ban.