More Perfect: The Gun Show

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Speaker 4 It's 1972. A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes.
Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 4 All they have left is a life raft and each other.

Speaker 4 This is the true story of the Robertson family and their fight to survive, hosted by me, Becky Milligan. Listen to Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House.

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Speaker 1 Hey, everyone. It's Latiff.
So we are coming up on the American presidential election.

Speaker 1 The Democrats have picked their choice for VP, Governor Tim Walls, who is an interesting guy for several reasons, but one of them has to do with guns. He is a proud gun owner.

Speaker 1 He won the congressional sharpshooting contest about 15 years ago when he was in Congress. The NRA gave him an A rating as a politician.

Speaker 1 They endorsed him as a Democrat over his Republican Republican challenger. He was even one of Guns and Ammo magazine's top 20 politicians.
But then he did a complete 180.

Speaker 1 He donated all the money he got from the NRA to veterans charities. He was one of the co-sponsors of the House Assault Weapons Ban Legislation in 2018.

Speaker 1 As governor of Minnesota, he passed some of the strictest gun control laws in the entire nation,

Speaker 1 leading to the NRA giving him an F because, as they have put it in one of their publications, quote, he has treated a basic human freedom, a right solidified in our founding document by the Second Amendment, as a politically inconvenient position for him.

Speaker 7 So,

Speaker 1 Tim Walls' stance on the Second Amendment, not to mention every other politician running stance on the Second Amendment, if you live in this country, especially if you live in a swing state, you're just going to keep hearing it over and over and over.

Speaker 1 And given how frequently mass shootings are happening in this country, we figured it was a good time, maybe better time than usual, to replay an episode from our sister show, More Perfect from 2017.

Speaker 1 In it, our former producer, Sean Ramaswaram, whose voice you may recognize from Vox's podcast today explained, Sean goes deep.

Speaker 1 word by word, even into the grammar of the Second Amendment, trying to understand why this amendment even exists.

Speaker 7 I mean, like, was this really the second thing they thought to amend in the Constitution?

Speaker 1 Anyway, it's my pleasure to be your ticket to the gun show.

Speaker 8 Wait, you're listening.

Speaker 10 You're listening

Speaker 10 to Radio Lab.

Speaker 11 Radio Lab from Britain.

Speaker 9 WNYC.

Speaker 9 I think we should start with one of the most confusing sentences in the Constitution, in the Bill of Rights.

Speaker 13 Not we the people.

Speaker 9 Not that one. No, I got a different one.
A well-regulated militia, comma,

Speaker 9 being necessary to the security of a free state, comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma,

Speaker 9 shall not be infringed.

Speaker 13 Say it one more time. Say it.
Sorry.

Speaker 9 Okay, from the top.

Speaker 13 And do it, do it with the commas again.

Speaker 9 Sure. A well-regulated militia,

Speaker 9 being necessary to the security of a free state, comma,

Speaker 9 the right of the people to keep and bear arms, totally unnecessary, comma,

Speaker 9 shall not be infringed.

Speaker 14 Is that the one that's about guns?

Speaker 9 Adam Winkler, who wrote the book on the Second Amendment, and that book is called Gunfight.

Speaker 13 He's a journalist.

Speaker 9 He's a professor of law.

Speaker 15 At UCLA.

Speaker 14 He said. It's almost as if James Madison, the author of the amendment, had just discovered this wonderful new thing, the comma, comma, and wanted to put it in there as many times as possible.

Speaker 9 Which is like a nerdy professorial joke. But like, seriously, what is it? And like, it had to be this one.

Speaker 9 Couldn't it have been the amendment about like quartering soldiers in your house that was really confusing? Yeah. No, it's the one about guns that they made like just indecipherable.

Speaker 14 And ever since, generations of Americans have been confused by the language of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 9 So when this thing was written, we had just fought this war with the British, this revolutionary war, and they tried to win it right from the get-go by coming for our guns.

Speaker 9 So these new states are looking at this new federal government. They're going, like, meh, we don't know if we want to trust you quite yet.

Speaker 9 So there's this Second Amendment that says, you guys can fight back.

Speaker 13 Like, the feds aren't going to disarm you. You can, your militias can keep your guns.

Speaker 9 That's, I think, what we agree on. But then after that, you just look at the sentence, then it's not just the commas that are confusing.

Speaker 14 If you look at the sentence as a whole, the pieces don't seem to fit together.

Speaker 9 There's some noun confusion. I mean, it's obvious that the sentence is about someone's right to to bear arms, but who?

Speaker 7 Who gets that right?

Speaker 9 At the beginning of the sentence, you get...

Speaker 17 A well-regulated militia.

Speaker 9 The militia. States have a right to form militias, to assemble groups of people, and those people gotta have their guns.
That's easy enough. But then later in the sentence, there's...

Speaker 14 Comma, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, comma, shall not be infringed.

Speaker 9 The people.

Speaker 9 Which people? Those people over there in the militia?

Speaker 8 All people?

Speaker 9 If you mean all people, why did you say militia?

Speaker 9 It's like the first clause seems to point to some sort of collective right to bear arms, and the second clause seems to point to some individual right to bear arms.

Speaker 19 Like this is supposed to be a popularly ratified document. It's actually not that easy to read.
It's really not that easy to read. And it's not, it wasn't that easy to read then.

Speaker 19 This is Jill Lapore, a staff writer at the New York magazine.

Speaker 9 She's also a professor of American history.

Speaker 19 I studied the 18th century.

Speaker 19 I'm really trained as a 17th and 18th century American political historian.

Speaker 9 And Jill says from the beginning when people thought about the Second Amendment, they tended to just focus on the first part.

Speaker 19 That the primary motivation for the amendment is about militias.

Speaker 17 A well-regulated militia.

Speaker 9 That this confusing sentence was widely read as this collective militia right, not an individual one.

Speaker 19 And this truth, that the Second Amendment, in fact, guarantees the right of an individual to bear arms and that the government, federal government.

Speaker 9 Can't limit that.

Speaker 4 In any fashion.

Speaker 9 Jill says that just didn't exist.

Speaker 19 It wasn't a thing.

Speaker 22 I disagree with the way you've characterized that, although what you said is stated in the media frequently.

Speaker 9 This is Stephen Hallbrook. He's represented the NRA in several cases.

Speaker 22 I've written several books on Second Amendment issues.

Speaker 9 He actually thinks, A, the sentence is just fine, as is.

Speaker 22 I don't think it's complicated at all.

Speaker 9 B, the framers were thinking about an individual right to bear arms.

Speaker 22 The Second Amendment refers to the right of the people to keep and bear arms. First Amendment refers to the right of the people peaceably to assemble.
I mean, who is that? It's individuals.

Speaker 22 They're not some kind of collective that doesn't exist in reality.

Speaker 17 So

Speaker 9 which was it?

Speaker 9 That's a really good question, Jad. I mean, it's a complicated one, too.

Speaker 9 What I can tell you is that, you know, people I spoke to for the story said, at least in the 20th century, when the Second Amendment was taught in law schools,

Speaker 9 it was taught as a sort of antiquated, outdated thing that had to do with militias, not so much individual rights.

Speaker 9 But to Labor Stephen Hallbrook and their respective sides, something they can both agree on is that this super sacred Second Amendment, this third rail of our American politics today, that just was not a thing.

Speaker 9 It was not like that.

Speaker 10 It was utterly ignored.

Speaker 9 People ignored this amendment.

Speaker 22 When I was an undergraduate, undergrad at Florida State University, I went to the Florida Supreme Court and started looking up law review articles on constitutional law issues, and I found that there was hardly anything written about the Second Amendment.

Speaker 19 No one ever wrote about that. Except for the Third Amendment.
There was no amendment that was less written about, less legislated, less debated,

Speaker 19 less the subject of Supreme Court conversation than the Second Amendment.

Speaker 9 Don't get me wrong. This is not to say people didn't think about guns.
People had guns, states regulated guns. But for most of our history, the Second Amendment,

Speaker 9 it was like sort of the runt of the Bill of Rights litter. Like no one argued about it.

Speaker 19 It's a striking thing to think about.

Speaker 9 There was no fight, no fight.

Speaker 19 How surprising that is, given its centrality to our political conversation today. What an extraordinary transformation.

Speaker 9 Because there was this window of time where all of this changes, that the script just flips. There's 200 years of everything being chill, and then suddenly you get this.

Speaker 23 I want to say those fighting words

Speaker 24 from my cold, dead hands.

Speaker 24 from my cold

Speaker 24 dead hands

Speaker 9 so basically in just a flash the second amendment goes from being ignored to being you will not disarm me explosive to being radioactive

Speaker 9 And in the process, we start to read the thing totally differently.

Speaker 9 All of a sudden, it's this hotly debated thing that's got nothing to do with that first part and everything to do with the second part. If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks.

Speaker 9 Everything to do with my personal right and me.

Speaker 30 Although the Second Amendment people, maybe there is, I don't know.

Speaker 9 And what I want to know is how did that happen?

Speaker 9 How do we start reading the Second Amendment the way we do now?

Speaker 9 And what I found out is that in the modern history of the gun rights movement and how we read the Second Amendment can be boiled down to these three totally unrelated, disjointed, seeming revolutionary events.

Speaker 25 Am I under arrest? Am I under arrest?

Speaker 9 One, an invasion in Sacramento. Then I'll be damned.

Speaker 16 Let me, what in the hell?

Speaker 10 Two, a revolt in Cincinnati.

Speaker 31 What credential do you have to tell me I'm wrong?

Speaker 9 And finally, BAM!

Speaker 9 Number three, a reckoning at the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 10 Unbelievable.

Speaker 32 What is that sound?

Speaker 6 Can you imagine that?

Speaker 13 So, you're going to tell me the story in three chapters? Yeah.

Speaker 33 The Honorable, the Chief Justice, and the Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States.

Speaker 33 Oh, yay, oh, yay, oh, yay.

Speaker 28 All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States are admonished to draw near and give their attention.

Speaker 28 For the court is now sitting. Oh, yay.

Speaker 28 God save the United States and this honorable court.

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Speaker 1 Radiolab is supported by Apple TV. It's 1972.
A young British family is attempting to sail around the world when disaster strikes. Their boat is hit by killer whales and it sinks in seconds.

Speaker 1 All they have left is a life raft and each other. How will they survive? The true story of a family's fight for survival, hosted by Becky Milligan.

Speaker 1 This is Adrift, an Apple original podcast produced by Blanchard House. Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season.
Follow and listen on Apple podcasts.

Speaker 34 Chapter 1, The Invasion.

Speaker 26 I'm a carpenter, I'm a builder, I'm a stand-up comedian, jazz drummer, structural repairman, high-performance aircraft.

Speaker 26 I did electromagnetic field, black-light, non-destruct testing for the Gemini Missile Program, and I'm an expert shot with guns.

Speaker 26 I was an expert shot with guns when I was 12 years old. I was raised a hunter and a fisherman besides being a carpenter and a builder.

Speaker 26 When I'm 12 years old, my father buys me a high-powered rifle, holotip ammo. I can knock an elephant down with that shit.
You see what I'm getting at?

Speaker 9 Can I get you to tell me, we got to start at some point. Can I have you tell me just your name and where we are and who you are? Is that cool?

Speaker 8 Can we do that first?

Speaker 7 I know it seems pretty odd.

Speaker 26 My name is Bobby Seale. I created the Black Panther Party.
I'm the founding chairman and national organizer of the Black Panther Party.

Speaker 9 Where are we standing right now?

Speaker 26 We're in Oakland, California.

Speaker 36 The Black Panthers.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so this transition from the militia to the individual, my right to bear arms, you could argue that that whole individual gun rights movement started in the 1960s with the Black Panthers in Oakland.

Speaker 19 It's an unlikely and kind of surprising origin for what's known as the individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 10 We were a different breed here.

Speaker 26 I mean, we're some well-read guys. We knew our shit.

Speaker 10 We know our history.

Speaker 9 Just to give some context, this is 1966.

Speaker 9 It's been an exceptionally bad time for race relations all over the country.

Speaker 37 More than 1,500 people were in the streets.

Speaker 9 Protesters are being beaten at sit-ins.

Speaker 9 There's attack dogs and hoses.

Speaker 9 And in particular,

Speaker 9 there was major tension between the black community and the police.

Speaker 39 One One of the cities most troubled by animosity between police and Negroes is Oakland, California.

Speaker 14 In the late 60s, there were several high-profile incidents of officers shooting unarmed black men.

Speaker 26 This is what was happening. You know, and

Speaker 26 what we did is that, yeah, we took a position.

Speaker 9 October 1966, Bobby Seale and his friend Huey P. Newton, they start this organization called the Black Panthers.

Speaker 26 Black Panther Party for Self-Defense.

Speaker 9 Now, Huey, Bobby's co-founder.

Speaker 26 Huey was two years in law school.

Speaker 9 He was going to the University of San Francisco School of Law, and one day he's sitting there as you do in law school, thinking about the law, thinking about Malcolm X, thinking about what he can do in Oakland, and it hits him.

Speaker 33 The Second Amendment of the Constitution guarantees the citizen a right to bear arms on public property.

Speaker 14 That they could argue that the Second Amendment gave them a right to have a gun.

Speaker 26 He said, that's a constitutional, democratic, civil human right.

Speaker 9 And no one had ever said that before?

Speaker 14 Well, there's always been those who claim that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms.

Speaker 9 But Adam Winkler says people who argued that were in the minority. They weren't taken too seriously.

Speaker 9 This was one of the first times that the individual rights reading was forced into the mainstream because

Speaker 9 coming out of law school class, Huey tells Bobby, if we have a right to bear arms, we individuals, then we can patrol the police, observe the police.

Speaker 26 Tell him if we, I said, you're talking about patrolling the police. What legal status are you in law school, so what legal status do we have?

Speaker 9 Huey pointed to that second half of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 26 The right of the people to bear arms, to possess and bear arms. Okay.

Speaker 9 He also pointed to a California state law that said you could carry a gun as long as it wasn't concealed.

Speaker 26 If the gun is not concealed, it's not illegal.

Speaker 14 So the Black Panther started policing the police.

Speaker 26 We did.

Speaker 14 They would go out in armed patrols and follow police cars.

Speaker 26 On 7th Street.

Speaker 9 Bobby told me about the first time they did it.

Speaker 26 West Oakland, California, a nightlife district.

Speaker 9 He says it was a weekend night. A police officer pulled over some guy and they started watching from down the street and a crowd starts to gather.
And is Huey holding a gun?

Speaker 7 Yes, he's holding a shotgun. What kind of gun is usher?

Speaker 26 It's a shotgun, a shotgun that I bought him. That gun you see within here, it's a high-standard gun.
It costs $89 or $79. I bought the damn gun.
I says, here, Huey, you got your shotgun now.

Speaker 9 So you've got this white cop cop on one side of the street arresting somebody. And on the other side of the street, you got a dozen black guys holding shotguns.

Speaker 26 Strictly for observation.

Speaker 26 Standing in a line. I had everybody standing in line.

Speaker 9 He told me the moment the cop noticed, he immediately stopped what he was doing with the guy he had pulled over and walked over to them and said, you have no right to observe me.

Speaker 26 And Huey says, no, California State Supreme Court ruling states that every citizen has a right to stand and observe a police officer carrying out their duty as long as they stand a reasonable distance away.

Speaker 26 A reasonable distance constitutes eight to ten feet. I'm standing approximately 20 feet from you and I'll observe you whether you like it or not.
He said, Man, what kind of Negroes are these?

Speaker 26 Let me see that gun. No, you cannot touch my weapon.
The cop says, Are you a Marxist? And you say, Are you a fascist?

Speaker 26 Are you a Marxist? Are you a fascist? Then the cop says, Well, I asked you first. And you say, and I asked you second.

Speaker 35 Are you a fascist?

Speaker 26 So, So, I mean, it's like a standoff.

Speaker 9 And this is where the dominoes start to fall. The standoff resolves itself peacefully, but the cops in Oakland are not happy, and they immediately start running this up the chain.

Speaker 26 Next thing we know.

Speaker 39 We've got to protect society from nuts with guns. And I think we should act, and we intend to act.

Speaker 26 Mulford, State Assemblyman Mulford, who represented Oakland, is trying to put a bill in to stop the Black Panthers.

Speaker 39 It's my intention to make it a misdemeanor to have loaded rifles and shotguns and weapons in public places.

Speaker 9 So this bill, the Mulford Act, is up for debate at the California State Capitol in Sacramento. And Bobby Seale decides the Panthers should be there for the debate and that they should take their guns.

Speaker 26 I took a delegation, an armed delegation, to the California State Legislature May 2nd, 1967. I had six women and 24 males.

Speaker 9 And how many guns?

Speaker 26 23 guns.

Speaker 9 And were they loaded?

Speaker 26 Yes.

Speaker 9 So they roll up to the assembly in Sacramento, and guess who happens to be waiting for them right there on the front lawn of the assembly?

Speaker 13 What are we talking? What year are we talking now?

Speaker 9 Guess who's governor?

Speaker 13 I don't know. Who was the governor?

Speaker 9 Guy by the name of...

Speaker 23 Win one for the gipper.

Speaker 41 Mr. Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 26 I went up there. When we got there, Ronald Reagan happened to be on the front lawn.

Speaker 7 Reagan? Reagan.

Speaker 26 I did not know he was going to be there on the front lawn.

Speaker 8 That's insane.

Speaker 26 He was on the front lawn talking to 200 future leaders of America.

Speaker 8 Kids?

Speaker 9 Kids. So you got Ronald Reagan.

Speaker 26 He's 50, 60 feet from us.

Speaker 9 And a bunch of white kids.

Speaker 26 In 11, 12.

Speaker 9 Hanging out on the front lawn of the state building in Sacramento. And this is like the 1960s.

Speaker 26 This would be insane now. But some of the kids saw us with our shotguns on our shoulders.

Speaker 10 And he says, some of the kids come running over where we are. They thought we were a gun club

Speaker 26 of some kind. And then the press followed.

Speaker 9 So Reagan's like, what's going on? The press is like, what's going on? And Bobby Seale.

Speaker 26 I says, I'm going to read a statement.

Speaker 40 The Black Panther Party for Self-Defense calls upon the American people in general.

Speaker 26 And that's when I

Speaker 40 and the black people in particular to take careful note of the racist California legislature, which is now considering legislation aimed at keeping the black people disarmed and powerless at the very same time racist police agencies throughout the country are intensifying the terror, brutality, murder, and repression of black people.

Speaker 23 Etc.

Speaker 26 And he says, while he was reading that, uniformed Capitol guards come running out, grabbed Ronald Reagan, took him in the opposite direction from us away from the kids.

Speaker 20 Okay.

Speaker 26 And so we decided to go inside because the assembly was in session at the time.

Speaker 26 Next thing I know, we're all loading on three elevators. Here's shotgun rifles pointing up, cameras in there.
It's crowded, body touching, body crowded.

Speaker 9 When they got off the elevator, he asked someone, which way to the spectator section so the Panthers could watch the legislature debate the bill.

Speaker 26 Somebody says, this way to the right. And so I walk into this this door.
And as I walk into the door, the president pro temp in the state assembly, we're on the actual floor of the assembly.

Speaker 26 This is not the goddamn spectator section.

Speaker 26 I said, come on, get the hell out of here, man. We're in the wrong goddamn place.

Speaker 13 They walked into the state capitol with shotguns?

Speaker 11 Wait a minute.

Speaker 9 And then all hell breaks loose.

Speaker 25 Am I under arrest? Take your hands off me if I'm not under arrest.

Speaker 25 Am I under arrest? I'm telling you to take your hands off me.

Speaker 26 I turn around and I see state assembling, white state assembling, ducking down behind their desks.

Speaker 42 If I'm under arrest, I'll come. If I'm not, don't put your hands on me.
Is this the way the racist government works? Don't let a man exercise his constitutional rights.

Speaker 42 If my sweaters ripped, you will get...

Speaker 9 You can point to this forgotten, unknown moment here in the state building in Sacramento as like the game changer for the conversation about guns in America. Because suddenly, overnight.

Speaker 26 We were on the front pages of newspapers around the world. We were a ragtag organization with this profound international notoriety.

Speaker 9 But in being introduced to the world, you had a lot of people going, wait, what? Like, there's a bunch of black men rolling around with guns?

Speaker 13 Walking into the Capitol building?

Speaker 9 When there's kids around? What came of that, that protest?

Speaker 26 By the end of that month, the Malford Act passed. The law said no could carry a loaded weapon inside city limits within 150 feet of public property.

Speaker 9 This was directed at the Black Panthers?

Speaker 26 We know it was.

Speaker 9 Now, people have all kinds of opinions about the Black Panthers and what they did, particularly after Huey Newton. The shooting happened at 5 a.m.

Speaker 9 Later that same year, was arrested for shooting and killing a cop.

Speaker 27 A pool of blood marks the spot where 23-year-old officer John Fry was found fatally wounded.

Speaker 9 The case was eventually dismissed, but what seems clear is that the Black Panthers' decision to use the Second Amendment to arm themselves, to show up armed at the state capitol in California, inspired a vigorous backlash.

Speaker 37 FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover today asserted that the Black Panthers represent the greatest internal threat to the nation.

Speaker 14 Americans thought a revolution was about to break out right here at home.

Speaker 9 This led to a whole new wave of gun control laws in California, but also federal gun control.

Speaker 14 Many of which seemed to be targeted towards African Americans rather than just reducing gun violence.

Speaker 9 Suddenly, America was like, we've got to get guns off the streets.

Speaker 14 But the irony was that even though those laws were designed to disarm left-leaning black radicals, many white rural conservatives

Speaker 14 thought that they were next, that government was going to take their guns next.

Speaker 9 Every action creates a reaction.

Speaker 9 And at the same time that this Panthers thing is hitting front pages of newspapers around the world, you've got assassinations, you've got race riots, you've got Vietnam protests.

Speaker 9 All of a sudden, everyone's clamoring for gun control. Democrats and Republicans.

Speaker 38 In fact, there is absolutely no reason why out on the street today, a civilian should be carrying a loaded weapon.

Speaker 11 Reagan? Reagan.

Speaker 9 That was the exact same day as the Black Panthers showed up at the state capitol in Sacramento with their shotguns. So Reagan.

Speaker 13 Reagan was into gun control.

Speaker 9 Reagan's got his fingerprints all over this thing. What's happening here is the Black Panthers show up in the Capitol.
Sacramento and Ronald Reagan react. They create some gun control.

Speaker 9 Then there's even more gun control, even federal gun control. And a lot of people are sitting at home watching this and they start to get very upset.

Speaker 34 Which brings us to Chapter 2: The Revolt.

Speaker 31 And I'm sitting there going, you know, we can't allow this to happen.

Speaker 11 Oh. No.

Speaker 31 I can buy the damn pistol that I want to buy.

Speaker 9 These two guys, John Aquilino, I live in Rockport, Texas. Joseph Tartaro.

Speaker 10 Buffalo, New York.

Speaker 9 They get us there, and they've both been into guns pretty much their entire lives.

Speaker 23 My father was a veteran of World War I. Did some recreational shooting with my mother.

Speaker 31 I used to love to go to the amusement park and and spend all day shooting 22s at little things that moved in the shooting gallery.

Speaker 9 But neither one of them was particularly hardcore about their gum beliefs until around the time the Black Panthers came along.

Speaker 31 You mean the fact that here were a bunch of people who were slightly darker complexed than New England

Speaker 31 Ivy League grads running around with firearms.

Speaker 31 Did that scare people?

Speaker 15 Hell yes.

Speaker 9 Did it scare you?

Speaker 31 No, it didn't scare me.

Speaker 9 John told me, Joe as well, that it wasn't the Panthers themselves that were the problem.

Speaker 31 I don't like anybody that tells me I can't do something.

Speaker 9 It was all the gun control laws that came in the wake of the Panthers.

Speaker 23 When the Gun Control Act was passed in 1968.

Speaker 6 Today we began to disarm the criminals and the careless and the insane.

Speaker 23 A lot of things disappeared that I had been used to.

Speaker 9 Joe says he starts to see gun shops in his neighborhood close.

Speaker 9 Like the furniture store in Buffalo that used to have a shotgun shotgun for five dollars they they stopped selling them and he says that just really bothered him because the reason you have a gun is for protection yeah it's like another form of insurance which wasn't an abstract idea for him buffalo in the 60s and 70s not the safest place in the world his house was even broken into I could only describe it as a home invasion.

Speaker 23 I mean, these guys actually battered their way through two doors.

Speaker 9 Joe says he and his wife and his dog huddled in one room with a gun while these two guys stormed through his house and robbed him.

Speaker 23 I think they grabbed my wife's purse, maybe some other money,

Speaker 43 and they left.

Speaker 23 I mean, by the time the police got there, they were gone.

Speaker 9 Joe's whole relationship with firearms is sort of predicated upon that, this idea that it's for self-defense. And here he's got people breaking into his house.

Speaker 9 He's got the cops not being there for him. He's got the government trying to take his gun away.
So what do you do?

Speaker 9 You join the NRA.

Speaker 23 Then I join to fight this gun control stuff.

Speaker 9 But this came at a moment where the NRA was at this crossroads unlike any it had seen before or since.

Speaker 14 Back when Joe joined in the early 70s, the NRA was not the die-hard supporter of gun rights that we know today.

Speaker 9 Because according to Adam Winkler, it was never meant to be.

Speaker 14 The idea behind the NRA, marksmanship continues to be fundamental right down to this day, was to increase civilian marksmanship training so that the next time there's a war, Americans would be capable of fighting it.

Speaker 9 And, you know, you don't hear much about the NRA's founders.

Speaker 18 But the NRA was formed in the 1870s, right after the Civil War, by a reporter for the New York Times.

Speaker 14 who thought that the Union soldiers had been so ineffective in the Civil War because they were not familiar with firearms.

Speaker 10 Really?

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 9 For like 100 years, their main focus was like teaching Boy Scouts how to shoot straight.

Speaker 17 Not the Second Amendment.

Speaker 9 And apparently.

Speaker 14 If you go back through issues of American riflemen in the 40s and 50s.

Speaker 9 It's like the NRA's version of Playboy, guns instead of girls.

Speaker 14 You'll be amazed that you can't find a single mention of the Second Amendment anywhere in those magazines.

Speaker 9 The NRA at that point was sort of like a gun trade group. They were not super political.
And the people who ran it.

Speaker 23 They were hunters, gentlemen hunters.

Speaker 9 they were just like these wealthy businessmen who like to hunt according to joe rich guys who you know they were hobbyists but you had all these people coming in like joe and like john who were convinced that guns weren't about shooting ducks they were about self-defense protecting yourself against criminals in a time of starkly rising crime rates and this would lead to this straight up head-on collision at the nra

Speaker 9 now right when joe and john joined the NRA, nra the organization had just for the first time sort of set up this lobbying arm.

Speaker 31 Yeah, it was the brand new Institute for Legislative Action.

Speaker 9 John actually got hired to work there in 1976.

Speaker 23 And the Institute for Legislative Action was supposed to fight for gun rights on Capitol Hill.

Speaker 9 That's what they both wanted it to do.

Speaker 15 But let's put it this way.

Speaker 31 We were the, if you would, the bastard stepchildren of the National Rifle Association.

Speaker 8 Really?

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 31 When the Institute for Legislative Action was formed in 1975, the NRA refused the Institute any office space in the building.

Speaker 9 In the mid-70s, the part of the NRA that lobbied politicians had to rent office space from the hotel next door to the NRA.

Speaker 43 I mean, it was crazy.

Speaker 31 And then

Speaker 11 78 people fired.

Speaker 31 Very interestingly.

Speaker 23 There was big firing.

Speaker 23 And then there was word that the NRA wanted to move, leave Washington, D.C.

Speaker 9 Sell the headquarters there.

Speaker 23 And move to Colorado Springs.

Speaker 7 And what's in Colorado Springs?

Speaker 23 Well, the Olympic camp.

Speaker 31 They were going to move to headquarters and put it near the Olympic sports training group so that they could then start writing all the magazines about all the Olympic sports.

Speaker 23 They really didn't know what the hell they were doing.

Speaker 31 They wanted to turn the NRA from an organization of firearms owners to

Speaker 31 a publishing company.

Speaker 23 They wanted to get out of the politics business.

Speaker 9 The older guard didn't seem to have the stomach for whatever gunfight some members wanted to have.

Speaker 20 They were very moderate.

Speaker 9 They thought, like, maybe we should try and kind of get out of this whole gun business thing.

Speaker 31 Well, hey, not just kind of getting out.

Speaker 9 John says there was even a moment when a report surfaced that suggested...

Speaker 31 That we should change the name of the association.

Speaker 8 Really?

Speaker 10 Yeah, they were going to take Rifle out.

Speaker 11 Tell me me more. Tell me.

Speaker 9 Do you remember what any of those proposed names were?

Speaker 8 No.

Speaker 9 But they were considering at least taking Rifle out.

Speaker 8 Oh, yeah. Huh.

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 31 And

Speaker 10 it bridled.

Speaker 23 I mean, I was just so pissed off. And that's when the seeds of revolt were planted.

Speaker 9 A few months later,

Speaker 23 I'd like to call to order the 129th 129th annual members' meeting.

Speaker 9 This is from one of those meetings.

Speaker 16 Cincinnati, Ohio, 1977.

Speaker 23 The annual NRA meeting of members.

Speaker 31 I think it was May, but I'm not sure.

Speaker 23 May 22nd.

Speaker 31 They had a big auditorium.

Speaker 23 The Cincinnati Convention Center.

Speaker 31 A thousand people showed up.

Speaker 23 Somewhere between 1,000 and 1,500.

Speaker 20 Ladies and gentlemen, all.

Speaker 9 now prior to this big meeting there had been little meetings secret meetings joe and a few other guys from illinois texas arizona they've been going back and forth by phone by mail one point they even met up at a motel in florence kentucky and they decided to form a small but fierce faction within the nra and your secret group did you have did you have a name did you call it something we were called the federation for the nra called ourselves the federation for nra

Speaker 9 And this tiny group planned a coup.

Speaker 9 Honorary life.

Speaker 23 It was a hot, steamy night in Cincinnati.

Speaker 9 The Federation members were all wearing buttons that said National Rifle Association with the word rifle underlined.

Speaker 23 We wore orange hats. We had walkie-talkies.
to connect with each other.

Speaker 9 How many people were there?

Speaker 23 Somewhere between 10 and 15 of us.

Speaker 9 They spread out through the crowd. How does the meeting start? Do you remember?

Speaker 31 Well, basically,

Speaker 31 you know, they did all the niceties.

Speaker 41 I pledge allegiance to the flag.

Speaker 9 Pledge of allegiance.

Speaker 9 Would you bow your heads with me, please? Opening prayer.

Speaker 8 Lord, you are awesome and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 31 And then...

Speaker 11 To a little business.

Speaker 10 There are four microphones on the floor.

Speaker 9 If there are any items you'd like placed on this agenda, now is the time to add.

Speaker 9 When it came time for the members part of the meeting where members submit proposals, which happens in like this super parliamentary sort of way, this guy, Neil Knox, he was part of their group.

Speaker 31 He kind of bullrushed the microphone and he said, the gathered members have a list of bylaws that they would like to have voted on.

Speaker 9 Translation, we've got these 15 demands.

Speaker 23 These 15 demands? I'm not sure if that's more or less than Martin Luther.

Speaker 9 The demands are basically, number one, we demand that the NRA not move its headquarters cancel that we demand the institute for legislative action which you want to kill should have more power hell yes hell yes and we demand that the current nra leadership be replaced we wanted to take over

Speaker 31 so the federation guy's making all these demands what was crazy was that the the leadership of the nra

Speaker 9 that was running the meeting they just sat there

Speaker 20 they they were like

Speaker 9 dumbfounded But every time the Federation guy would make a motion, Judge Porter would say,

Speaker 31 Do I have a second?

Speaker 26 There are many.

Speaker 29 Okay, the motion has been made.

Speaker 9 And then the floor debate would begin. People would start to speak for and against each amendment.
The Federation members would use their walkie-talkies to coordinate who spoke at what microphone.

Speaker 9 How many votes did you need that day?

Speaker 23 I think at least 600 votes.

Speaker 9 And how many votes did you think you had if you needed 600 or so? How many did you think you had?

Speaker 23 We hadn't the slightest idea. Going in, we anticipated 50-50 support.

Speaker 9 So as each of the 15 amendments are being debated, the insurrectionists are running around in their orange caps with their walkie-talkies, trying to rally support from everyone.

Speaker 31 That discussion, debate lasted eight hours.

Speaker 9 It went from 7 p.m.

Speaker 23 till close to 4 o'clock in the morning.

Speaker 13 4 a.m.? Yeah.

Speaker 31 And nobody left.

Speaker 35 They were all there.

Speaker 23 There were tense moments. I mean, we really didn't know where we could pull this off.

Speaker 9 But Joe says one of the the big turning points is when a guy named Bob Kukla gets up to the mic. He was at the time the head of the Institute for Legislative Action.
He gets up to the mic.

Speaker 23 And he played a tape.

Speaker 9 You remember cassette tapes, right? This was one that Bob Kukla secretly recorded.

Speaker 23 I don't know how he did it.

Speaker 9 But what you hear on this tape is Bob Kukla talking to his bosses at the NRA and they're yelling at him.

Speaker 23 Berating him for going to war every time somebody talks about gun control.

Speaker 9 They're basically like, Bob,

Speaker 22 shut up.

Speaker 9 He had the tape there and he played it over the side.

Speaker 23 And of course, that electrified the audience. You could actually hear people gasping.

Speaker 9 So the rank and file was audibly...

Speaker 23 This was evidence that the other side was going to deep six the gun control fights.

Speaker 9 These people on the tape, they're all in the room.

Speaker 10 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 23 They're sitting next to him at the table.

Speaker 9 Over the course of this one nine-hour meeting on a hot, steamy night in Cincinnati, every single one of those 15 proposals was passed.

Speaker 31 We stopped the building in Colorado.

Speaker 9 Ensured the NRA wouldn't change its name. They fired the leadership.

Speaker 31 You know, just like the political savants that figured that Hillary is going to get the presidency, they just absolutely took it in their shorts.

Speaker 9 And maybe the biggest change, the most important change, was that the Institute for Legislative Action, this political lobbying arm of the NRA, it was given the keys to the car.

Speaker 9 They were not the bastard stepchild anymore.

Speaker 11 They were the NRA.

Speaker 36 You know what?

Speaker 11 We won.

Speaker 14 They had essentially staged a coup.

Speaker 31 What do they call 1776?

Speaker 14 It's the same thing. And when the sun rose the very next day,

Speaker 14 the NRA had a whole new board.

Speaker 14 committed to a new no-compromises view of the Second Amendment, in which individuals have a right not only to have a gun, but to have almost any gun that they want and have as many of them as they want and can take those guns almost any place they want.

Speaker 14 American gun politics literally changed overnight.

Speaker 9 And just shortly after this coup, the NRA bolts this abridged version of the Second Amendment right on the wall, front and center in its headquarters.

Speaker 14 The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Speaker 9 Nice, clean, totally uncomplicated sentence.

Speaker 14 Conveniently left out was the part part that talked about a well-regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state.

Speaker 9 I asked John, like, what about the militia part of the sentence? Why doesn't the NRA ever talk about that?

Speaker 31 The militia, okay, now you get me back to asking you if you, and Sean, I love you dearly.

Speaker 16 Trust me.

Speaker 22 But

Speaker 31 it's only been in the last, what, 30 years that, if you'll pardon the expression, the bullshit media has turned the militia into a four-letter word. The militia is you and me, Sean.

Speaker 9 Post-coup, the NRA took a very hard line on gun control and became an irrepressible political force in America.

Speaker 45 Friend and foe agree the NRA's power to scare congressmen lies in its ability to mobilize its members in any congressional district at the touch of a computer button.

Speaker 9 They start pouring millions of dollars into lobbying, and just a few years after that Cincinnati revolt, the NRA endorses its first presidential candidate.

Speaker 30 The Constitution does not say that government shall decree the right to keep and bear arms.

Speaker 10 Reagan?

Speaker 30 Reagan. The Constitution says the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

Speaker 9 At this point, everyone and their uncle leaves out the militia part of the Second Amendment, which is why Americans eventually start to forget that the militia clause or whatever you want to call it even exists.

Speaker 23 I wish I'd saved that and said it last.

Speaker 19 One of the things that most surprised me when I was doing this research.

Speaker 9 This is Jill Lapore again.

Speaker 19 I think by the 1990s, the new interpretation of the Second Amendment had so penetrated popular opinion that people were more familiar with the Second Amendment than with the First by 1991.

Speaker 19 The First Amendment?

Speaker 19 That eclipse really kind of shocks me.

Speaker 9 But even if the Panthers and the President and the American people are all down to sort of forget about this militia clause of the Second Amendment, it didn't mean a lot without the courts.

Speaker 9 And the courts, particularly the Supreme Court, weren't buying it.

Speaker 19 Warren Berger, I think he's giving a television interview, and he says that this new interpretation of the Second Amendment was one of the greatest pieces of fraud.

Speaker 19 One of the greatest pieces of fraud.

Speaker 46 I repeat the word fraud on the the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.

Speaker 9 And this was a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon, though. Yeah.

Speaker 11 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Yeah, so the Supreme Court, obviously not dying to have this conversation at the moment, but it's not just the Supreme Court.

Speaker 9 If you look at the federal courts, the entire federal court system in America, there has not once in our history at this point, over 200 years, been a single instance of some gun law, some state, local gun law, getting up to a court and the court going, you know what, you can't do this.

Speaker 9 It violates the Second Amendment. That's just not even happening.

Speaker 9 Really? Not even happening.

Speaker 36 There wasn't a Second Amendment smackdown anywhere in federal court?

Speaker 9 This isn't a thing.

Speaker 7 Wow.

Speaker 9 And getting the Supreme Court to weigh in on it, that doesn't even look like it could be a thing. It doesn't even look like much more than a fantasy until.

Speaker 47 For gun owners, there are few names that have become synonymous with protecting our rights. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome a true patriot, Dick Heller.

Speaker 9 Dick Heller showed up.

Speaker 29 Freedom!

Speaker 26 Freedom! Let's hear it! Freedom!

Speaker 9 And changed everything.

Speaker 6 Well, hello, freedom lovers everywhere out there.

Speaker 28 Freedom!

Speaker 8 Freedom!

Speaker 8 Freedom!

Speaker 8 Wow!

Speaker 12 Let's hear it! Wow!

Speaker 12 Wow! Freedom!

Speaker 12 Let's hear it!

Speaker 13 More perfect will continue in a moment.

Speaker 13 All right, mama.

Speaker 13 Give your dad some love.

Speaker 13 Oh yeah.

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Speaker 35 God save the United States and this honorable court.

Speaker 48 However in 2008 revives the Second Amendment, or you could even say

Speaker 48 breathes life into the Second Amendment because the Second Amendment had never been taken truly seriously by federal courts until 2008. Oh, yay! Oh, yay!

Speaker 13 That's Sandy Levinson, professor at the University of Texas Law School. This is More Perfect.
I'm Jad Abum Rad here with Sean Ramasfirm. All right, so Sean.

Speaker 16 Jad.

Speaker 13 I guess now it's time for chapter three, Dick Heller, right?

Speaker 9 Yeah, we're going to get to Dick.

Speaker 9 But first, here's what's going on in America. The Second Amendment has become one of those issues that can get you elected.

Speaker 9 Academics have begun to have a vigorous debate about its meaning, but the Supreme Court is still staying out of it.

Speaker 9 They're leaving this up to the states, which already have all sorts of gun laws of their own to deal with.

Speaker 30 But then... December 12, 2000, Republican George W.

Speaker 9 Bush becomes president-elect after a divided U.S. Supreme Court effectively halts recounts in Florida's contested presidential vote tally.

Speaker 10 But then George W.

Speaker 9 Bush is elected. The NRA likes George W.
Bush.

Speaker 49 The National Rifle Association

Speaker 49 has a proud history of protecting the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Speaker 14 And in 2001, the Bush administration declared that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to own guns.

Speaker 9 UCLA law professor Adam Winkler, again.

Speaker 14 A right that was not limited, as most courts had held, to service in the militia.

Speaker 9 And almost right after he gets into office, Bush's Attorney General John Ashcroft put out a letter, this public letter to the NRA, announcing that the Department of Justice had adopted a new interpretation of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 14 And then, right around the same time as the Bush administration memo came out, a court in Texas ruled that the Second Amendment did protect an individual right to bear arms.

Speaker 9 And that was a first.

Speaker 7 It's a big deal.

Speaker 9 Before this, all the decisions had kind of veered in the other direction.

Speaker 14 And because of that court ruling and John Ashcroft's letter, these three libertarian lawyers,

Speaker 15 Alan Gurra, Constitutional Attorney, Bob Levy, a chair of the board at the Cato Institute, and Clark Neely, Neely.

Speaker 9 He's at Cato too.

Speaker 14 Thought the timing was right.

Speaker 15 We thought that it was a good time for some litigation.

Speaker 9 Now, one thing you need to know about these guys is that they weren't necessarily doing it for the guns.

Speaker 14 They had no association with the NRA or the gun rights movement.

Speaker 9 For them, it was more about getting the government to back off.

Speaker 21 In our country, when the government wants to restrict our liberty, it is incumbent on the government to make the case for it.

Speaker 21 It's incumbent on the government to say, here's why you shouldn't be permitted to exercise that right.

Speaker 9 So that was their angle.

Speaker 13 That is interesting. I've always wondered why the gun rights movement has become such a proxy war for like anti-governmentism.

Speaker 9 Yeah, well, I mean, if you think about it, and this is something Professor Sandy Levinson told me, is that sort of embedded in this amendment is the very idea that you can take up arms against a government to protect yourself and your fellow man from tyranny.

Speaker 48 On the far right, or occasionally on the far left, you find people who are willing to say this, that this is really what's terrific about the Second Amendment.

Speaker 48 But mainstream conservatives and mainstream liberals are not very happy with those arguments. They are embarrassed by them.

Speaker 48 And so mainstream conservatives want to talk about self-defense against burglars. And mainstream liberals want to talk about

Speaker 48 how the Second Amendment protects state-organized militias and almost nothing else.

Speaker 9 Anyway, getting back to this story, these three libertarian lawyers, they decide to put together a case, and their idea was to target this really restrictive gun law in D.C.

Speaker 21 All handguns were banned. You could own a shotgun or a rifle, but the law specifically made it illegal to ever put around in the chamber, even in self-defense.
So there was really,

Speaker 21 we described it as a ban on all functional firearms.

Speaker 9 But in order to challenge that law, they needed to find a plaintiff.

Speaker 13 Interesting. How do you find a plaintiff? You look for somebody who got robbed? What do you do?

Speaker 15 Well, we can actually instigate litigation. We can take out a full-page ad in the New York Times saying, you want to vindicate your Second Amendment rights? Give us a ring.

Speaker 21 We just essentially got the word out, talked to,

Speaker 21 I would say, between two and three dozen. people.

Speaker 15 They all had really interesting stories.

Speaker 9 They found a guy who was gay.

Speaker 21 A gentleman named Tom Palmer.

Speaker 9 Who had previously been assaulted when he lived in California because he was gay.

Speaker 21 Was almost murdered by a a skinhead ma, homophobic thugs.

Speaker 9 And he wanted a gun to protect himself.

Speaker 21 Our lead plaintiff was an African-American woman named Shelly Parker.

Speaker 9 She was trying to protect herself against local drug dealers and the cops actually told her she should get a gun, which was illegal.

Speaker 7 Weird. So they had this whole group.

Speaker 15 So we ended up with three men, three women, mid-20s to their early 60s. Four of them were white, two of them were African-American.

Speaker 9 And the problem they ran into was that all of these super sympathetic plaintiffs didn't have this very special thing they needed to bring a case. Standing.
Standing.

Speaker 21 Which is just a legal term, meaning they didn't have a sufficient grievance to be in court.

Speaker 15 Like, if you're going to bring a case, you have to show that you've been actually harmed by not being able to get a gun.

Speaker 9 You have to show some physical, concrete proof that harm has been done, that you've been denied a gun, and none of the plaintiffs had that.

Speaker 9 Except for one guy.

Speaker 16 Dick, are you, Sean?

Speaker 31 I am.

Speaker 9 That's me. Great to meet you.
And you?

Speaker 9 Dick Heller. What does your hat say?

Speaker 6 Sean, this is my favorite hat. Make America free again.

Speaker 9 So he actually gets paid by the freedom.

Speaker 6 With a big Western handgun in the center.

Speaker 9 And it looks like you drew a trigger out there. Is that what you did?

Speaker 6 Well, it was missing the trigger, so we had to update it.

Speaker 9 Who's we?

Speaker 39 Me.

Speaker 7 Okay.

Speaker 9 I met Dick right outside the Supreme Court, the building where he became famous. He's a slim, 75-year-old white guy, sports glasses that look straight out of the 70s.

Speaker 6 Got a situation here. You want to cross?

Speaker 9 Sure, what's the situation?

Speaker 6 The anti-Trump protesters are here.

Speaker 9 I actually happened to meet him in D.C. the day after Trump won the election.

Speaker 6 They hate freedom, apparently.

Speaker 9 The president-elect was visiting the White House. There were protesters everywhere.

Speaker 6 Pull out your knife. Not my president.
They're anti-Trump protesters.

Speaker 32 Don't you like freedom?

Speaker 6 What about freedom?

Speaker 8 Fuck Trump.

Speaker 32 What about freedom?

Speaker 9 Most of the protesters that were passing us were white, but just as a few young black men pass us by, he says,

Speaker 6 See you on the plantation.

Speaker 8 Love Trump's heat.

Speaker 32 Freedom!

Speaker 28 Make America drum forget.

Speaker 32 Freedom!

Speaker 9 See you on the plantation.

Speaker 8 Yeah.

Speaker 9 Why'd you say that?

Speaker 6 In Washington we call it the government plantation.

Speaker 9 You didn't mean you kids are about to be slaves or something, because that's how I interpreted it.

Speaker 32 Well, yeah.

Speaker 6 The more power government has, the less freedom you have, the closer you get to ball and chain of a plantation.

Speaker 6 There's a pretty good place to eat right there if you're here for a couple of days. Have you been in there?

Speaker 9 I have not.

Speaker 6 Yeah, pretty good.

Speaker 9 Okay, Hyatt Regency, this is good for you. We can do this?

Speaker 15 Sure, yeah.

Speaker 9 Great.

Speaker 9 We ended up talking at the Hyatt, which is just down the street from the Supreme Court. And Dick explained to me that his journey with guns, like John and Joe, began pretty casually, like 1976.

Speaker 9 He's living in DC,

Speaker 9 and one day he's sitting at home.

Speaker 6 I was watching my hero, Matt Dillon, gun smoke.

Speaker 9 Different Matt Dillon. You ain't going nowhere.

Speaker 10 And he had this long-barreled handgun.

Speaker 6 I was about 30 years old and I figured, golly, I should own my first gun. So I went and bought my, what I call my Matt Dillon special, high-standard 22-revolver Matt Dillon buntline.

Speaker 6 And it was just, I live in America. We're a cowboy society.
I should have a cowboy gun. It was just

Speaker 6 nothing, no really deep thought to it.

Speaker 9 But then just a few months after he got that gun.

Speaker 6 In October of 1976.

Speaker 9 A trend that started with the Mulford Act and the Black Panthers back in Sacramento hits Washington, D.C.

Speaker 6 D.C. gun control regulations outlawed firearms ownership.

Speaker 10 You get that gun law which outlawed all handguns.

Speaker 6 So I had some choices. I could turn it into the government.
Not going to happen. I can throw it in the dipsty dumpster.
Not going to happen.

Speaker 6 Or there was another option. I could go to jail.

Speaker 11 Not going to happen.

Speaker 9 Eventually, he decides on option D, give the gun to his brother.

Speaker 6 Well, my brother lived in Maryland, so that made it very convenient.

Speaker 9 Did you just go visit your gun in Maryland? What did you do?

Speaker 6 Yes, I would go visit and caress and use my gun.

Speaker 9 What did you use it for?

Speaker 6 Target practice, of course.

Speaker 9 Dick made his gun visitation situation sound functional, but... I think like any long-distance relationship, it mostly sucked because more and more he didn't feel safe where he lived.

Speaker 6 I lived about 10 blocks from the Capitol building, right across the street from the number one most infamous drug dealer den in the city called Kentucky Courts. Every night at 2 a.m.

Speaker 6 the chief drug dealer would fire a 9 millimeter into the air, empty the clip, and that was the signal every night at 2 o'clock that drug dealing was over for the day.

Speaker 9 It's clear that living through the crack epidemic in DC really shaped a lot of Dick's views on guns.

Speaker 8 So

Speaker 9 in the years after the handgun ban, Dick starts the very long process of finding a way to get his gun back to DC and he eventually even quits his desk job to pursue getting his gun back full time.

Speaker 6 I'm all over Capitol Hill and I see

Speaker 6 Security guards have guns.

Speaker 6 Well,

Speaker 6 golly, why can't I be a security guard? Golly, maybe that would help me have a gun that I can't have on my own. Golly, let's see how easy or not easy this is.
Golly, one step leads to another.

Speaker 9 Golly, just like that. Dick was able to have a gun in DC, but only during the day and only while he was working.

Speaker 6 Like Barney Fife, at the end of my shift, I have to turn in my gun and my bullet.

Speaker 9 And they kept it there.

Speaker 6 And they kept it on site in the safe, yes.

Speaker 9 He finally starts looking for some help, some legal help.

Speaker 6 I knew Washington because I'd lived here and I'd gone to some think tanks, Cato and Heritage and some others. I knew they existed.

Speaker 9 And right around the time Dick's out there looking for some help, turns out these lawyers are out there looking for some dick.

Speaker 8 No, no.

Speaker 9 He wasn't their ideal sympathetic guy.

Speaker 6 I was told repeatedly, and it was in print, that I was the worst choice.

Speaker 15 It was less than optimal.

Speaker 6 You know, because of that plantation thing he said, or he would always talk smack about the federal government in interviews one day Clark Neely put a note in my hand and said Dick Heller this is what you say I just wanted a gun to protect my house shut up

Speaker 21 so he wasn't their favorite plaintiff but Dick did one thing that no one else had done which is besides just wanting an illegal handgun in DC, he actually filled out an application to register a gun that he already possessed again in Virginia and had that application denied.

Speaker 9 And he had this denial slip or whatever it's called. He like literally had this physical proof of his grievance.

Speaker 9 And this simple, technical, arbitrary, little stupid piece of paper gave him what's known as standing to bring the case.

Speaker 21 Dick Heller ended up being kind of the last man standing. That was nothing to do, that was not our choice.

Speaker 7 Regardless,

Speaker 9 he became their guy, and these three lawyers take the case to the DC court.

Speaker 6 And the judge,

Speaker 6 after inspecting it, said the case case can go forward.

Speaker 6 Magic moment.

Speaker 6 This magic moment.

Speaker 50 The Supreme Court is entering the debate over the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Speaker 50 Today's case has aroused huge interest among citizens and politicians alike, and it has divided even the president and vice president.

Speaker 34 Chapter 3, The Reckoning.

Speaker 9 March 18th, 2008.

Speaker 14 The day the Heller case was argued at the Supreme Court, everyone understood how high the stakes were.

Speaker 14 Outside in front of the Supreme Court, protesters by the hundreds were marching and

Speaker 14 chanting in favor of gun rights and in favor of gun control.

Speaker 14 Journalists from all all over the world descended upon the Supreme Court that day and inside the Supreme Courthouse.

Speaker 6 Not a creature was stirring.

Speaker 10 Not even a mouse. You could have heard a mouse, I say.

Speaker 26 And everybody is just quiet.

Speaker 10 And you could hear your heartbeating.

Speaker 6 And suddenly, bam!

Speaker 10 And then, oye, oye, oye,

Speaker 6 the clerk yelled at the top of his lungs. And then there's a strange sound.

Speaker 7 What can that be?

Speaker 6 It was the swishing of the robes of the justices as they ascended the steps to the bench.

Speaker 8 Unbelievable.

Speaker 51 We will hear argument today in case 07290, District of Columbia versus Heller.

Speaker 9 This was the first time in our history the Supreme Court would directly try to figure out what the Second Amendment means.

Speaker 51 Mr. Dellinger.

Speaker 9 And immediately.

Speaker 52 Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice.
It may please the court.

Speaker 9 D.C.'s lawyer Walter Dellinger gets up and jumps right into it.

Speaker 52 The Second Amendment was a direct response.

Speaker 9 And he sort of begins with the central question, like, what was James Madison thinking when he wrote this super confusing sentence like 200 years ago?

Speaker 9 Was he thinking about the individual people and their right to own a gun? Or was he thinking about the collective right

Speaker 9 of the militia to own a gun?

Speaker 52 And the first text to consider is the phrase protecting a right to keep and bear arms.

Speaker 9 And he says if you look at the phrase, the phrase keep and bear arms, how it was used at the time.

Speaker 52 Every person who used the phrase bear arms used it to refer to the use of arms in connection with militia service.

Speaker 9 Dillinger says that if you look at some of Madison's rough drafts of the Second Amendment, it's pretty clear that when he says people have a right to bear arms, all he really means is like report for duty.

Speaker 52 Even if the language of keeping and bearing arms were ambiguous, the amendment's first clause confirms that the right is militia-related.

Speaker 24 It's essentially

Speaker 24 if you're right, Mr. Dellinger.

Speaker 9 Chief Justice Roberts jumps in and is like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Speaker 24 Why would they say the right of the people to keep arms?

Speaker 9 If they meant just the people in the state militias.

Speaker 24 Why wouldn't they say state militias have the right to keep arms? Mr. Chief Justice, I believe that the phrase the people and the phrase the militia were really in sync with each other.

Speaker 24 The Federalist Farmer uses the phrase, the people are the militia, the militia are the people. But that's right.
Doesn't that cut against you if the militia included all the people?

Speaker 24 It includes includes all the people. Yes, I do believe it includes all the people.

Speaker 9 At this point, everyone sort of jumps in. A bunch of justices

Speaker 9 start interrupting each other.

Speaker 9 It's kind of like a scrum, and they're all trying to figure out, okay, so when Madison wrote the phrase,

Speaker 9 like, who were the people he was talking about?

Speaker 8 Thinking of the people.

Speaker 52 What those words meant.

Speaker 10 Was the people just the militia or everyone, all the people?

Speaker 9 What is the relationship between the second part of the sentence, the people part, and the first part of the sentence, the militia part?

Speaker 52 They go into like Wisconsin and common law, right?

Speaker 9 He speaks of common law.

Speaker 36 Scottish Highlanders for some reason.

Speaker 24 At one point the subject is arms in both clauses.

Speaker 9 They even sort of start to diagram Madison's sentence.

Speaker 24 I think as this court

Speaker 9 and the net result, according to Adam Winkler, was the four liberals

Speaker 9 seemed to want to emphasize the militia part of the sentence. And then you had the four conservative justices

Speaker 9 who seemed to want to emphasize the people part of the sentence, the second part.

Speaker 24 Of course, I don't see how there's any

Speaker 24 any

Speaker 24 contradiction.

Speaker 9 And Team People's team captain, the quarterback, the first chair that day was, without a doubt, Justice Antonin

Speaker 24 Scalia.

Speaker 24 Why isn't it perfectly plausible, indeed reasonable, to assume that since the framers knew that the way militias were destroyed by tyrants in the past was not by passing a law against militias, but by taking away the people's weapons.

Speaker 14 Justice Scalia, of course, was a very conservative justice.

Speaker 5 Grew up in Queens. This is Joan Biskupic, longtime reporter covering the Supreme Court.

Speaker 9 She's also written a biography of Justice Scalia.

Speaker 5 He was an avid hunter, and he grew up at a time when

Speaker 5 young men were trained in firearms in high school.

Speaker 40 Marksmanship has played a vital role in our country's law.

Speaker 14 Even from the time he was a kid at school in Queens, he said he used to carry his gun for rifle practice at school on the subways of New York.

Speaker 5 Can you imagine doing that today in New York City?

Speaker 24 You're being unrealistic in thinking that the second clause is not broader than the first. The principal purpose here is the militia.

Speaker 24 The second clause goes beyond the militia and says the right of the people to keep and bear arms. So why have the first clause? I mean, what's it doing? I mean, what help is it's going to be?

Speaker 9 Well, here throughout the arguments is that Scalia is very, very forwardly pressing this sort of individual rights argument.

Speaker 9 And justices like David Souter

Speaker 9 are arguing back, saying, what about the collective, the militia? This goes on for well over an hour.

Speaker 9 The justices sort of grilling the lawyers, arguing amongst themselves, everybody trying to figure out what was in James Madison's head.

Speaker 9 Until finally, Justice Breyer, one of the liberal justices, is like

Speaker 32 hold the phone.

Speaker 24 That really is my question.

Speaker 9 Forget what Madison Madison intended. There's no way for us to know.
Let's talk about now. Let's talk about gun violence.
This sentence was most definitely written about muskets.

Speaker 9 What about handguns and assault rifles? What is reasonable now?

Speaker 24 80 to 100,000 people every year in the United States are either killed or wounded in gun-related homicides or crimes or accidents or suicides, but suicides are more questionable.

Speaker 24 That's why I say 80,000 to 100,000. Now, in light of that,

Speaker 24 why isn't a ban on handguns a reasonable or a proportionate response on behalf of the District of Columbia?

Speaker 24 Because, Your Honor, for the same reason that was offered by numerous military officers at the highest levels of the U.S. military at all branches of service, writing in two briefs,

Speaker 9 they agree with us that the handgun ban serves to weaken America's military preparedness because Alan Gura basically argues when you take away people's guns, they're going to be less prepared if and when they enlist in the Army.

Speaker 9 To which Justice Breyer is like, they can still practice shooting.

Speaker 24 With their rifles?

Speaker 9 Which weren't banned in D.C.

Speaker 24 They can go to gun ranges, I guess, in neighboring states.

Speaker 24 But does that make it unreasonable for a city

Speaker 24 with a very high crime rate,

Speaker 24 assuming that the objective is what the military people say, to keep us ready for the draft if necessary, is it unreasonable for a city with that high crime rate to say no handguns here?

Speaker 24 You want to say

Speaker 24 that's your answer.

Speaker 24 Well, you want to say yes, that's correct, but I want to hear what the reasoning is, because it is a big crime problem. I'm simply getting you to focus on that.

Speaker 9 That, by the way, was Justice Scalia telling Alan Gura how to answer Justice Justice Breyer's question.

Speaker 24 The answer is yes, as Justice Scalia noted, and it's unreasonable, and it actually fails any standard of review that might be offered under such a construction of the individual right, because proficiency with handguns has rare.

Speaker 9 Anyway, the oral arguments last 97 minutes, far longer than most other cases.

Speaker 14 And going into the arguments, many Supreme Court watchers figured the case would be a close 5-4 decision. And it could go either way.

Speaker 14 And as with all of these close cases, the question was: what would Anthony Kennedy, the swing justice, do?

Speaker 14 As in so many issues in America, it comes down to what does Anthony Kennedy believe?

Speaker 14 So at the oral argument, and I had the good fortune to be at the oral argument in the Heller case, everyone was looking to hear what would he say about the Second Amendment.

Speaker 14 His was really the vote that counted. And the very first comment he made

Speaker 24 that had nothing to do with the concern of this remote settler to defend himself and his family against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that.

Speaker 9 One of the first things he said was about bears. Like, not bear arms, but grizzly bears.
And the point Kennedy was trying to make was clear.

Speaker 9 Don't you think the framers had other reasons that they wanted people to have guns? other than just being in a militia?

Speaker 9 Like, what about people being in their homes and just needing to defend themselves?

Speaker 6 And that's when I silently screamed at the top of my lungs so nobody could hear me. Yes, we win.

Speaker 7 Dot, dot, dot, something.

Speaker 53 We return now to the historic Supreme Court decision handed down this morning.

Speaker 51 Justice Scalio has our opinion this morning morning in case 07290, District of Columbia versus Heller.

Speaker 24 We hold that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to have and use arms for self-defense in the home and that the district's handgun ban as well as its requirement that firearms in the home be rendered inoperative violates that right.

Speaker 5 It was a groundbreaking reading of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 5 Scalia minimized that clause referring to a well-regulated militia and put the stress on the second clause that referred to the right of the people.

Speaker 52 The people will not be deprived of the right to keep and bear arms.

Speaker 9 This was as good as it got for him on the bench.

Speaker 5 I think so.

Speaker 9 RIP, the Militia Clause, December 15, 1791 to June 26, 2008. A pretty good run, if I'm being honest.

Speaker 9 For the first time in the history of these United States, the courts definitively declared that the Second Amendment gives every American the right to a gun for self-defense.

Speaker 6 It was a great day for freedom in America. It was a great day for the Constitution, a great day for citizens.
It was a great day for gun owners. It was a great day for fearful people.

Speaker 9 Of course, not everyone agreed.

Speaker 29 I mean, to me, that's a travesty.

Speaker 29 This is Jack Raykov, professor of history and political science at Stanford University.

Speaker 9 He filed a brief for the court, and he says Scalia's reading of the history is just wrong.

Speaker 29 The Second Amendment was not about individual rights.

Speaker 9 You could argue that we shouldn't even be talking about history.

Speaker 29 Because the nature of firearms has changed so radically from the 18th century to our own time.

Speaker 9 And that ultimately, and here he echoed Justice Stevens and his dissent.

Speaker 24 The court has decided to enter today into a political thicket.

Speaker 48 I think it's all politics.

Speaker 29 To be honest, I mean,

Speaker 29 I don't really believe in constitutional law anymore. I think constitutional law is a fiction.
You know, it's become so highly politicized in so many areas. I think constitutional law is bunk.
Wow.

Speaker 29 I just, you know, I'm historian. I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have any professional stake in defending the judiciary.

Speaker 9 But there's a very big

Speaker 5 but. He did have a major caveat.

Speaker 24 The next section of our opinion points out that, like most rights, the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.

Speaker 5 He said, like all rights, it's not absolute.

Speaker 24 It is not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.

Speaker 5 Which is very important to keep in mind.

Speaker 24 Our opinion should not be taken to cast doubt on long-standing prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings.

Speaker 9 This is another thing that we tend to forget.

Speaker 9 The decision says every individual has a right to bear arms, but most interestingly, the decision also says, of course, we need gun control.

Speaker 16 The word heller has come to represent like

Speaker 9 Second Amendment rights. Like, are you for heller? Are you against heller? Even though being for heller is being for gun control.

Speaker 6 That's confusing.

Speaker 7 Yeah, it is.

Speaker 9 I mean, after all this time, it's still just totally confusing. You have a right to a gun, but the government has a right to regulate it.
Dick Heller gets his gun back in DC.

Speaker 7 But DC still also has all sorts of gun regulations.

Speaker 9 And you see the same pattern all over the country. Some states are lenient, some are super strict, and both approaches seem to comply with Heller.

Speaker 9 In a way, the Heller decision is just like all those commas and clauses that we started with in James Madison's sentence.

Speaker 9 It's this confusing declaration that leaves the door wide open for interpretation.

Speaker 9 Which

Speaker 9 obviously sucks.

Speaker 9 We could have used a little more clarity on how to live with this Second Amendment right to bear arms.

Speaker 9 But that door being open,

Speaker 9 it gives us an opportunity, I think

Speaker 9 an opportunity to get it right to fix it,

Speaker 9 and it seems like now would be a pretty good time.

Speaker 36 Our story was produced by Sean Romsferum.

Speaker 13 Adam Winkler's book, which a lot of our research was drawn from, is called Gunfight.

Speaker 36 More Perfect is produced by me, Jad Abu Umraad, Jenny Lawton, Julia Longoria, Kelly Prime, Sean Romsferum, Alex Overington, Sarah Kari, and Susie Lechtenberg.

Speaker 34 With Ellie Mistall, Christian Farias, Linda Hirschman, David Gable, and Michelle Harris.

Speaker 34 Supreme Court audio is from OEA, a free law project in collaboration with the Legal Information Institute at Cornell. Leadership support from More Perfect is provided by the Joyce Foundation.

Speaker 34 Additional funding is provided by the Charles Evans Hughes Memorial Foundation.

Speaker 54 Hi, I'm Emma, and I live in Portland, Maine. Here are the staff credits.
Radio Lab was created by Jad Abimrod and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Letif Nasser are our co-hosts.

Speaker 54 Dylan Keefe is our Director of Sound Design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Bloom, Becca Bressler, W.

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Speaker 54 Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger, and Natalie Middleton.

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