I consider myself to be a Constitutionalist and a believer in Jeffersonian principles. Some may ask, what is a Constitutionalist or Jeffersonian principles? Well, in general terms it means that I strongly support the Constitution as the law of this land and especially the Bill of Rights. Specifically, it means that I believe in individual rights. There are numerous organizations out there that support and fight every day for these rights. The National Rifle Association (NRA) is such a group as is the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The ACLU is well known for its court, political, and media battles in support of First, Fourth, Fifth, Tenth, etc. Amendment rights. I am drawn to these organizations, due to my beliefs, and I generally support their positions in defending and preserving our rights from those that would limit or remove them.. However, I have become concerned about the ACLU, which has decided that the Second Amendment is not worthy of their support as are the other individual rights specifically listed in the Bill of Rights.

The ACLU takes this odd position on the Second Amendment for two primary reasons, along with a fall back stance. First, they have decided that the term "the people" that is contained in the Second Amendment does not apply to "the people" as it does in all of the other rights contained in the Bill of Rights. Instead, they take the position that this is a collective right and can only be assigned to a militia group, such as the National Guard, which means that Congress can limit or remove gun ownership as they see fit. Secondly, they cite the 1939 Supreme Court case of US. vs. Miller, as proof that the Supreme Court agrees with their beliefs. And finally, they take the fall back position that even if their first two reasons do not hold water, the Second is now outdated because the founding fathers could not have envisioned the type of arms that are currently available and the dangers of a few using firearms in criminal activity outweigh the value of this right to society.

Let's first address the position of the ACLU that the Second Amendment is a collective right rather than an individual one. Their entire position rests on the assumption that the term "the people" in the Second Amendment is different from the term "the people" that is used everywhere else in the Constitution and throughout the Bill of Rights. In further support of their position, the ACLU argues that the term militia is made in reference to something like the National Guard. Many people buy into these arguments without taking a close look at the Second Amendment and other supporting documentation. However, if one takes the time to only mildly explore the actual meanings here, they come to a very different conclusion. For example, the only way to assume that "the people" is a collective right in the Second Amendment is to apply that very same definition to much if not all of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Of course, that would mean that rights such as freedom of speech, press, etc. could be interpreted as collective rights rather than individual ones and therefore subject to limitations and removal of such rights listed for "the people" by Congress and other legislative bodies. Of course, that's exactly what the ACLU's position is on the Second Amendment, but in all other cases the ACLU does not support such a stance and has made it their only goal to oppose such things. How could the ACLU take such an odd position? Well, maybe it's that term "militia." When it comes to the term "militia" and this assumption by the ACLU, there is a significant body of information, which clearly indicates that the term "militia" means every able-bodied and law-abiding person. In addition, there are no quotes or written documents from the founders that would even lead one to suspect anything other than the definition commonly accepted by most constitutional scholars, i.e. the militia is the people. If anything, there is a wide collection of quotes that say just the opposite as compared to the ACLU's assumption. A few of the major ones are as follows:

"I ask, who are the militia? They consist now of the whole people, except a few public officers." George Mason, Virginia's U.S. Constitution Ratification Convention, 1788.

"That the people have a right to keep and bear arms; that a well regulated militia, composed of the body of the people, trained to arms, is the proper, natural, and safe defense of a free state." George Mason, Virginia ratification convention, 1788.

"What plan for the regulation of the militia may be pursued by the national government is impossible to be foreseen...Little more can reasonably be aimed at with the respect to the people at large than to have them properly armed and equipped." James Madison, Federalist No. 29.

"The said Constitution [shall] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience, or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." Samuel Adams, Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788.

"Militias, when properly formed, are in fact the people themselves and include all men capable of bearing arms." Richard Henry Lee, Letters from The Federal Farmer, 1788.

"Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Congress have no power to disarm the militia. Their swords and every other terrible implement of the soldier, are the birthright of an American...The unlimited power of the sword is not in the hands of either the federal or state governments, but, where I trust in God it will ever remain, in the hands of the people." Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789.

Clearly, the ACLU's position here is not supported by any of the words of the founders nor is it supported when viewed against the rest of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Without a doubt, one must conclude on this point that the Second Amendment is an individual right and the ACLU is absolutely wrong.

The second stance by the ACLU that involves the 1939 Supreme Court case of U.S. vs. Miller is equally flawed as their first belief. This case is the only time the Supreme Court has had the opportunity to directly rule on the constitutionality of federal firearm statues during the 20th century. In this case, the court ruled that "in the absence of any evidence that the use or possession of a shotgun with a barrel of less than eighteen inches has a reasonable relationship or use in a militia, we cannot say that the Second Amendment guarantees the right of one to keep such an instrument." In addition, the Court ruled that the weapon in question was not any part of the ordinary military equipment or that its use could contribute to the common defense. Clearly, for the keeping and bearing of a firearm to be constitutionally protected, the firearm should be a militia or military type weapon. Also, the Court noted that the militia consisted of "all males physically capable of acting in concert for the common defense when called for service these men were expected to appear bearing arms supplied by themselves and of the kind in common use at the time." The court implicitly rejected the belief that only those members of a specific militia are covered under the Second Amendment when it did not discuss whether there should be evidence that the defendants met the qualifications for inclusion in the militia. Clearly, they understood that the militia was all of the people. The rulings from this case are not supportive of the ACLU's position whatsoever, and in fact one could easily make an argument that if challenged, the bans on certain types of semiautomatic rifles, such as that included in the Brady Crime Bill and found in states such as New Jersey and California, are unconstitutional and would be struck down if challenged. As with the first position of the ACLU, one must conclude that there is little or no evidence to support their position. In fact, one would have to argue that the evidence supporting the opposite view presented by Second Amendment advocates is overwhelming.

The fallback position taken by the ACLU on the Second Amendment is possibly the most damaging to their overall position on individual rights. The ACLU argues that even if their first two stances are incorrect, as has been abundantly shown here and in other articles, the Second Amendment is still subject to any restrictions set forth by Congress, because the founders could not have foreseen the development of modern small arms and the potential danger from the few that would cause harm with firearms outweigh their overall value. Besides the fact that millions of crimes are prevented each year because law-abiding citizens possess firearms, the problem with this position is that the same argument applies to any of the individual rights listed in the Bill of Rights. In fact, such an argument has been used against the ACLU during court battles over the First Amendment. For example, surely the founders could not have expected the development of hate groups and their use of the First Amendment to further their divisive message. The vast majority of Americans, myself included, find such positions to be reprehensible and offensive, but yet the ACLU has fought many battles to insure that these people have the right to spread their message of hate. One could easily argue that the damage caused by racism and hate in this country are significant and in reality far more damaging on a much larger scale than anything a shotgun in ones closet could ever cause. Another example of where the ACLU has strongly opposed any regulation on the First Amendment rights is the Internet. Unquestionably, the founders could not have anticipated the development and explosion of use of the Internet as we have today and will experience in the coming decades. There are many great advantages to the Internet and we have only begun to scratch the surface, but yet there is also a dark side to the Internet. For example, there are negative Internet sites that range from groups spreading their messages of hate and lies, to descriptions of bomb making devices and how-to manuals, and finally to pornography. Does the existence of a few negative sites out of the millions of good sites mean that the entire Internet should be regulated and the First Amendment restricted? The ACLU says no. As with their first two positions on the Second Amendment, the ACLU's fallback position again does not hold water. With any freedom, there will always be those that abuse it and take advantage of the situation to further their positions. There will always be new challenges to any right and new ways to use it. Some good and some of a questionable nature. This is true of the Second Amendment as well as the First and other amendments. This is simply the price of freedom.

Having gone through this process of dissecting the position of the ACLU on the Second Amendment, the question now becomes why do they take such an odd stance that is counter to their supposed beliefs in individual rights? Why do they not join the NRA and other Second Amendment advocates in supporting all individual rights? I believe the answer comes down to a couple of issues. First, the vast majority of the members and leadership of the ACLU have never fired or maybe even held a firearm. Their knowledge base around firearms has been developed through movies, television, and the media. Therefore, many view firearms and firearm owners as a threat. Furthering their perceived fear of firearms is a belief that various firearm related activities, such as hunting, are unacceptable in a civilized society. And lastly, their lack of contact with firearms and knowledge around the subject makes it easy for them to believe that the rights listed under the Second Amendment are, in the arena of individual rights, unnecessary and even expendable. Until the members and leadership of the ACLU overcome their hypocritical desire to lessen the individual rights of those that they don't understand or agree with, they will never truly be viewed as an organization interested in supporting individual rights. Rather, they will be considered just another special interest group with a "holier than thou" belief system when it comes to the Second Amendment. Let's all hope that the ACLU quickly realizes the error of their ways on this topic and in turn joins the NRA in the fight for civil rights.

Dr. Jeremy Blanks is a Senior Research Scientist with the leading R&D company in the world. He has a wide range of interests, but lately has focused on the right to self defense.

In March, for the first time in the nation’s history, a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable.

There used to be an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. That consensus no longer exists — thanks largely to the work over the last 20 years of several leading liberal law professors, who have come to embrace the view that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own guns.

In those two decades, breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law, they have helped to reshape the debate over gun rights in the United States. Their work culminated in the March decision, Parker v. District of Columbia, and it will doubtless play a major role should the case reach the United States Supreme Court.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

“My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise,” Professor Tribe said. “I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control.”

The first two editions of Professor Tribe’s influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

The earlier consensus, the law professors said in interviews, reflected received wisdom and political preferences rather than a serious consideration of the amendment’s text, history and place in the structure of the Constitution. “The standard liberal position,” Professor Levinson said, “is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution.”

The Second Amendment says, “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.” (Some transcriptions of the amendment omit the last comma.)

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment’s protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment’s protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

The individual rights view is far from universally accepted. “The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia,” said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected.”

Scholars who agree with gun opponents and support the collective rights view say the professors on the other side may have been motivated more by a desire to be provocative than by simple intellectual honesty.

“Contrarian positions get play,” Carl T. Bogus, a law professor at Roger Williams University, wrote in a 2000 study of Second Amendment scholarship. “Liberal professors supporting gun control draw yawns.”

If the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit does not step in and reverse the 2-to-1 panel decision striking down a law that forbids residents to keep handguns in their homes, the question of the meaning of the Second Amendment is almost certainly headed to the Supreme Court. The answer there is far from certain.

That too is a change. In 1992, Warren E. Burger, a former chief justice of the United States appointed by President Richard M. Nixon, expressed the prevailing view.

“The Second Amendment doesn’t guarantee the right to have firearms at all,” Mr. Burger said in a speech. In a 1991 interview, Mr. Burger called the individual rights view “one of the greatest pieces of fraud — I repeat the word ‘fraud’ — on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Even as he spoke, though, the ground was shifting underneath him. In 1989, in what most authorities say was the beginning of the modern era of mainstream Second Amendment scholarship, Professor Levinson published an article in The Yale Law Journal called “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.”

“The Levinson piece was very much a turning point,” said Mr. Henigan of the Brady Center. “He was a well-respected scholar, and he was associated with a liberal point of view politically.”

In an interview, Professor Levinson described himself as “an A.C.L.U.-type who has not ever even thought of owning a gun.”

Robert A. Levy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a libertarian group that supports gun rights, and a lawyer for the plaintiffs in the Parker case, said four factors accounted for the success of the suit. The first, Mr. Levy said, was “the shift in scholarship toward an individual rights view, particularly from liberals.”

He also cited empirical research questioning whether gun control laws cut down on crime; a 2001 decision from the federal appeals court in New Orleans that embraced the individual rights view even as it allowed a gun prosecution to go forward; and the Bush administration’s reversal of a longstanding Justice Department position under administrations of both political parties favoring the collective rights view.

Filing suit in the District of Columbia was a conscious decision, too, Mr. Levy said. The gun law there is one of the most restrictive in the nation, and questions about the applicability of the Second Amendment to state laws were avoided because the district is governed by federal law.

“We wanted to proceed very much like the N.A.A.C.P.,” Mr. Levy said, referring to that group’s methodical litigation strategy intended to do away with segregated schools.

Professor Bogus, a supporter of the collective rights view, said the Parker decision represented a milestone in that strategy. “This is the story of an enormously successful and dogged campaign to change the conventional view of the right to bear arms,” he said.

The text of the amendment is not a model of clarity, and arguments over its meaning tend to be concerned with whether the first part of the sentence limits the second. The history of its drafting and contemporary meaning provide support for both sides as well.

The Supreme Court has not decided a Second Amendment case since 1939. That ruling was, as Judge Stephen Reinhardt, a liberal judge on the federal appeals court in San Francisco acknowledged in 2002, “somewhat cryptic,” again allowing both sides to argue that Supreme Court precedent aided their interpretation of the amendment.

Still, nine federal appeals courts around the nation have adopted the collective rights view, opposing the notion that the amendment protects individual gun rights. The only exceptions are the Fifth Circuit, in New Orleans, and the District of Columbia Circuit. The Second Circuit, in New York, has not addressed the question.

Linda Singer, the District of Columbia’s attorney general, said the debate over the meaning of the amendment was not only an academic one.

“It’s truly a life-or-death question for us,” she said. “It’s not theoretical. We all remember very well when D.C. had the highest murder rate in the country, and we won’t go back there.”

The decision in Parker has been stayed while the full appeals court decides whether to rehear the case.

Should the case reach the Supreme Court, Professor Tribe said, “there’s a really quite decent chance that it will be affirmed.”

Nabila Mango, a therapist and a U.S. citizen who has lived in the country since 1965, had just flown in from Jordan last December when, she said, she was detained at customs and her cellphone was taken from her purse. Her daughter, waiting outside San Francisco International Airport, tried repeatedly to call her during the hour and a half she was questioned. But after her phone was returned, Mango saw that records of her daughter's calls had been erased....

When I left private practice in 1998 to begin with the ACLU, I knew that the position would allow me to work on some interesting and important cases. I did not predict that I would be, in the words of that aphorism that is part blessing and part curse, practicing civil liberties law in "interesting times." I had a front-row seat when the city of Seattle overreacted to anti-WTO demonstrations in 1999 by declaring most of downtown a "No Protest Zone." New computer technologies turned me, somewhat by accident, into an authority on the rights of public school students who get suspended for using the Internet to say things their school principals don't like. Most important, I did not predict that much of the ACLU's work in the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11 would be devoted to defending the concept of the rule of law itself, which has been assailed by the pernicious argument that it is somehow an unaffordable luxury for the government to follow the rules that protected our nation's freedoms for two centuries.

Recognizing historical parallels can help you frame a successful argument. We were contacted by students who were threatened with suspension from school not because of anything they had written on the Internet, but because they had created a bulletin board for open discussion on which other anonymous students had said punishable things. In many important respects, the case resembled the famous sedition trial against John Peter Zenger in 1735.

Zenger was an early publisher of newspapers, which at the time were a new and unfamiliar technology that allowed people to express their ideas to a wider audience at an unprecedentedly low cost. Zenger got into trouble not for his own writings, but for creating a platform where other anonymous speakers criticized the British bureaucrat then running the New York colony. The jury refused to convict Zenger, and his story motivated the framers of the Constitution to include strong protections for freedom of speech and press.