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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 19, 2024

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Do successes through the courts not count? I believe that if you look at the last fifty years or so, there's been a steady march of increasing gun rights in the US. My understanding is that prior to the 1960s, it was actually quite unusual to read the Second Amendment as preserving an individual right to own firearms, and state-level laws on it could be quite restrictive. Since then, however, both judicial and legislative pressure, owing partly to advocacy by gun rights organisations like the NRA, have established and expanded individual rights to gun ownership. This is particularly obvious if you look at, for instance, the spread of right-to-carry laws.

Honestly, this surprises me because I would have said that gun rights is pretty much the only social issue on which the right has been consistently winning. They're losing or at best holding steady on everything else, but guns are the one place where they are successfully advancing.

Do successes through the courts not count?

Not when they're totally fake, granting a theoretical right to keep and bear arms but in practice accepting restrictions sufficient to vitiate said right. That's what Heller and Bruen were, and if you think otherwise, try buying a gun out of state, or (lawfully) buying and carrying a gun in New Jersey or Times Square.