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16 Const. Comment. 221 (1999)
Commonplace or Anachronism: The Standard Model, the Second Amendment, and the Problem of History in Contemporary Constitutional Theory

handle is hein.journals/ccum16 and id is 229 raw text is: Articles COMMONPLACE OR ANACHRONISM: THE STANDARD MODEL, THE SECOND AMENDMENT, AND THE PROBLEM OF HISTORY IN CONTEMPORARY CONSTITUTIONAL THEORY Saul Comell* A new consensus on the meaning of the Second Amend- ment appears to be crystallizing among constitutional scholars.1 This new model asserts that the Second Amendment protects both an individual and a collective right of the people to bear arms. Proponents of this interpretation also argue that Amend- ment is part of a checking function designed to enable the peo- ple to resist government tyranny, by arms if necessary.2 Bor- rowing conceptual language from the physical sciences, supporters of this new interpretation contend that scholarship on the Second Amendment has produced a paradigm comparable to that employed by physicists to describe recent research: the new interpretation is dubbed the Standard Model.3 To sup- port their interpretation, proponents of the new orthodoxy quote liberally from the writings of Federalists, Anti-Federalists, and early constitutional commentators such as St. George * Associate Professor of History, Ohio State University. I would like to thank Steve Conrad, David Konig, Suzanna Sherry, and Eugene Volokh for reading earlier drafts of this essay. 1. See Randy E. Barnett and Don B. Kates, Under Fire: The New Consensus on the Second Amendment, 45 Emory L.J. 1139 (1996). 2. Sanford Levinson, The Embarrassing Second Amendment, 99 Yale LJ. 637 (1989). 3. On the use of the term Standard Model to describe the emerging body of scholarship on the Second Amendment, see Glenn Harlan Reynolds, A Critical Guide to the Second Amendment, 62 Tenn. L. Rev. 461-71 (1995).

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