Americans embrace guns!

You can deny reality, but that doesn’t make it true any more than it does for a whining three-year-old’s temper tantrum.

Glenn Reynolds nails it in his USA Today column.

“Americans Embrace Guns.”

This past weekend, the Tennessee Law Review held a symposium on “New Frontiers in the Second Amendment.” It was a follow-up, of sorts, to a symposium held almost 20 years ago, and boy, has a lot changed since then.

…At present, we’ve reached the point where the Second Amendment can be characterized as ordinary constitutional law. That is, it now protects a right that attaches to individuals, and that those individuals can enforce in federal court.

Of course “ordinary constitutional law” doesn’t mean that everything is settled — in fact, an area in which all the legal questions were settled once and for all would be more like extraordinary constitutional law. But it does mean that questions relating to gun ownership, gun carrying, and the like are now dealt with in the same way that federal courts deal with other questions of constitutional rights.

Overall, the trend of the past couple of decades seems to be toward expanding gun rights, just as the trend in the 1950s and 1960s was toward expanding free speech rights. America has more guns in private hands than ever before, even as crime rates fall, and, after a half-century or so of anti-gun hysteria, the nation seems to be reverting to its generally gun-friendly traditions.

This is a state of affairs that seemed almost inconceivable a mere two decades ago, and therein lies a reminder: It often seems as if the deck is stacked, and change is inconceivable. Twenty years ago, the prospect of this kind of expansion in constitutional freedom seemed very dim. But in America, change, when it comes, can be sudden and dramatic — even when, as here, the general current of punditry and political opinion seems set in stone. Keep that in mind, as you contemplate other political issues.