document: Around the world , national theologies are crumbling : communism , apartheid and , here in America , the worship of guns -- to foreigners , the single craziest thing about us . Do you sense an outbreak of sanity about gun control ? I do . There was retired Chief Justice Warren Burger preaching sacrilege on the cover of Parade magazine a couple of weeks ago . A Time Magazine/Cable News Network poll reports that 87 % of gun owners themselves favor a seven-day waiting period for handgun purchases ; three-quarters favor registration of semi-automatic weapons and handguns , and half favor registration of rifles and shotguns . Unfortunately , there is the Second Amendment to the Constitution : `` 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 . '' Most right thinkers take comfort in that funny stuff about the militia . Since the amendment 's stated purpose is arming state militias , they reason , it creates no individual right to own a gun . That reasoning is good enough for the ACLU . But would civil-libertarians be so stinting about an amendment they felt more fond of ? Say , the First ? The purpose of the First Amendment 's free-speech guarantee was pretty clearly to protect political discourse . But liberals reject the notion that free speech is therefore limited to political topics , even broadly defined . True , that purpose is not inscribed in the amendment itself . But why leap to the conclusion that a broadly worded constitutional freedom -LRB- `` the right of the people to keep and bear arms '' -RRB- is narrowly limited by its stated purpose , unless you 're trying to explain it away ? A colleague says that if liberals interpreted the Second Amendment the way they interpret the rest of the Bill of Rights , there would be law professors arguing that gun ownership is mandatory . The most thorough parsing of the Second Amendment is a 1983 article in the Michigan Law Review by Don Kates , a gun enthusiast . Kates expends most energy demonstrating that at the time of the Bill of Rights , all able-bodied men were considered to be part of the `` militia '' and were expected to defend the state if necessary . I 'm not sure this is as clinching an argument as Kates seems to think . The fact that once upon a time everyone was a member of the militia does n't prove that everyone still has a right to a gun even after the composition of the militia has changed . But Kates has other bullets in his belt . The phrase `` right of the people '' appears four other times in the Bill of Rights -LRB- including the First Amendment -RRB- . In all these other cases , everyone agrees that it creates a right for individual citizens , not just some collective right of states as a whole . Kates also marshals impressive historical evidence that the Second Amendment , like other Bill of Rights protections , was intended to incorporate English common law rights of the time , which pretty clearly included the right to keep a gun in your home for reasons having nothing to do with the militia . If there is a good reply to Kates 's fusillade , the controllers have n't made it . Of course the existence of an individual right to own guns does n't mean that it is absolute . What are the limits ? In the Supreme Court 's one 20th-Century treatment of the Second Amendment , it held somewhat ambiguously in 1939 that sawed-off shotguns are n't necessarily protected by the Constitution without proof that they are the kind of weapon a militia might have used . Working from that decision and the common law , Kates says the amendment 's protection should be limited to weapons `` in common use among law-abiding people , '' useful for law enforcement or personal defense , and lineally descended from weapons known to the Framers . -LRB- No nuclear bombs . -RRB- He adds that they must be light enough for an ordinary person to carry -LRB- `` bear '' -RRB- , and even that they ca n't be especially `` dangerous or unusual . '' He says that the amendment places no limit on mandatory registration or laws against concealed weapons in public . This list seems quite reasonable and moderate , though where it all comes from is not clear . In suggesting , for example , that it would be fine to ban automatic rifles but not semi-automatics , Kates is slicing the constitutional salami pretty thin . But in what I suspect was the main purpose of his exercise -- establishing that a flat ban on handguns would be hard to justify under the Constitution -- Kates builds a distressingly good case . The downside of having a Bill of Rights is that the protection of individual rights usually entails social costs . This is as true of the Second Amendment as it is of the First , Fourth , Fifth and Sixth . The downside of having those rights inscribed in a Constitution , protected from the whims of majority rule , is that they ca n't be re-defined as life changes . It would be remarkable indeed if none of the Bill of Rights became less sensible and more burdensome with time . Talking and writing are as central to American democracy as they ever were ; shooting just is n't . Gun nuts are unconvincing -LRB- at least to me -RRB- in their attempts to argue that the individual right to bear arms is still as vital to freedom as it was in 1792 . But the right is still there .
extractive_keyphrases: gun control handgun purchases gun ownership law enforcement second amendment right constitution kates