Why So Silent? The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment Debate After DC v. Heller
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6187837 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Emma Long (0000-0002-1573-2904) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 12 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Publication date | 2017-07-31 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1991-9336 • E-ISSN: 1991-9336 |
| Publisher | OpenEdition (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.4000/ejas.11874 |
| OpenAlex | W2563389053 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 14 |
In District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) the Supreme Court appeared to give to gun rights activists what they had campaigned for since the 1970s: a ruling that the Second Amendment encompassed an individual right to bear arms for the purposes of self-defence. But as the debate about gun rights returned to the top of the political agenda in the United States as a result of a series of high profile mass shootings in 2015 and the death of Justice Antonin Scalia in 2016, two things became clear: that Heller had not ended the political or legal debate about Second Amendment rights and that the Supreme Court had been noticeably absent from the debate since applying the Heller ruling to the states in McDonald v. Chicago in 2010. This article argues that, far from the success claimed by gun rights supporters, the consequences of Heller fundamentally undermined some of their key arguments and forced a shift in the nature of the debate. Both worked to keep the Supreme Court away from the debate at a time when greater clarity about the meaning of Heller was needed
Economic Justice · Gun control · Meaning (existential · Originalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Supreme court · Criminal Law and Evidence · Judicial and Constitutional Studies · Law, Rights, and Freedoms · Law · Philosophy
The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited
The Militia and the Right to Arms, or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent
Gun Regulation, the Police Power, and the Right to Keep Arms in Early America
Arms and the Man
The Ideological Origins of the Second Amendment
How Public Opinion Constrains the U.S. Supreme Court
The Least Dangerous Branch Revisited
What the Framers Intended
| Highly cited | No |
|---|