The Second Amendment in Court - Joseph Blocher

Joseph Blocher

Heller itself is the outcome of a sustained campaign to change the meaning of the Second Amendment. It took decades for people with a broader view of gun rights to get the court to adopt their reading, but they did. And so if people want to push back on that, and, you know, change Heller or Bruin or whatever, it may take time, but it took time to get them there in the first place. And so, you know, even those things that may feel like you have to take for granted in constitutional law, they're the result of people's choices. I often tell my students constitutional law, it's not something that happens to us, it's something that we do. And so even these sort of broad provisions of constitutional doctrine, let alone the changes you can make in your community day to day. We're all we're all authors of that story.

Andrew Chand

Welcome to solving gun violence, a student led podcast from the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project, we are dedicated to finding effective strategies to combat one of America's most urgent issues, gun violence. Each of our episodes feature experts sharing actionable solutions to improve public safety while upholding individual rights. My name is Andrew Chand, and I'm a fourth year student at the University of Virginia's Frank Batten School of leadership and public policy. And your host for today, for this episode, I'm being joined by Joseph Blocher. Joseph Blocher is a distinguished professor of law at Duke who specializes in constitutional law, legal history, and most relevant for today, the Second Amendment. His work focuses on gun rights and regulations, as well as the relationship between law and violence. This was a wonderful conversation where we discussed the evolution of Second Amendment case law, the history of firearm law in the United States, the currently unfolding Second Amendment related legal battles and possible paths forward. I hope you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did you.

Andrew Chand

Professor Blocher, thank you so much for being here with us today. You're obviously an expert on the Second Amendment, and there's been a lot of changes, especially in my lifetime, regarding how we understand and interpret the Second Amendment. And a lot of those changes have obviously been driven by the Supreme Court. I think a lot of our listeners may not understand this full legal journey that the Second Amendment has been on in recent years. So could you briefly describe the legal evolution of the Second Amendment over these years?

Joseph Blocher

Sure. I mean, I think probably the place to start is just by saying that for the for most of American history, like more than two centuries, there's really kind of one big question for the Second Amendment, which is whether the right to keep and bear arms is limited to people and arms and activities that have some connection to the organized militia. Right? So if you look at the 27 words that make up the Second Amendment, it says a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed for most of American history. Courts interpreted those words to mean, okay, this right is connected to the organized militia, which in the late 1700s would have been like the state militia, but especially starting in around the mid 1900s there was, I think, the ascendancy of an alternative view, which is that the Second Amendment is not about, or at least it's not solely about the organized militia. It also encompasses an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense, right? So, so we ask, you know, to answer your question, how, what's the journey the Second Amendment has been on? The biggest journey has been that in 2008 in a case called district Columbia versus Heller, the Supreme Court endorsed that individual rights interpretation of the Second Amendment. So as a matter of constitutional law, the amendment went from being just about organized militia, which doesn't actually trigger a whole lot of constitutional challenges, because the government's not usually disarming the organized militia into an individual right to keep and bear arms for things like self defense in the home. And that was kind of like, like, making this right all of a sudden relevant for purposes of litigation. So, so it's really, I think about it, at least from 2008 to the present is sort of like, I don't know, the era of the modern Second Amendment, or the era of, like, the second amendment that's implementable in courts. And lots of stuff has happened during that period, which we can talk about too the courts kind of change the rules it uses for evaluating whether gun regulations are constitutional. But like, the biggest thing, I think, like the sort of like, Big Bang moment for the Second Amendment was, was the Heller decision in 2008 for endorsing that individual rights view.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, absolutely, I I've taken one constitutional law class, and we spent probably two full classes talking about Heller 2008 is big case, obviously, as you've noted, but there's also been some more, some more recent cases as well. Do you think you could talk our listeners through, maybe like Chicago and McDonald's, and then maybe even getting all the way up to the Brune case, which we can definitely talk some more about.

Joseph Blocher

Yeah, I'd be happy to this. I love it. It's funny that you've spent some time with the Heller decision. That was Heller, I should say, just by way of autobiography, was my introduction to the Second Amendment, because I was one of the attorneys who helped write the briefs in that case. So you and I had the same, the same, meet cute with the second amendment through the through the Heller decision. So to answer your question about like, you know, some of the other cases that mean a lot here. So, Heller, I said, you know, the biggest takeaway from that decision was the court says the Second Amendment is not limited to the organized militia. It includes an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. Fact, says that's the core of the Second Amendment, right, not the militia part, right? But that leaves a lot of open questions on the table, like, okay, well, here's one, District of Columbia versus Heller, as you can tell from the title is a case from the District of Columbia, meaning it's just about the federal government. And in constitutional law, there's a separate question of, if the federal government is bound by a right, does that mean that the state and local governments are also bound by a right? Washington, DC is the federal government. What about, for example, if Chicago wanted to pass the same kind of a law that the District of Columbia had, which was basically a city-wide prohibition on handguns, is that also subject to the Second Amendment? Well, in the McDonald case, which you mentioned in 2010 The court said yes, they said that the Second Amendment right that we've recognized in Heller also binds state and local governments. That's a really important decision, just as a matter of sort of practical impact, because in many ways, like the vast majority of gun laws still today, are passed at the state and local level. I mean, there are some really important ones at the federal level, to be sure, but a lot of stuff about where you can carry your gun, for example, what kind of license you got to get, like, that's all state level law. And so the McDonald decision extended Heller from the federal government also to apply to state and local government. So that was one big move. Another thing that Heller left open was, okay, we've recognized that there is this individual right to keep and bear arms for self defense. But that doesn't mean that all gun regulation is unconstitutional right like and the Heller Court recognized this. They said, You know, like all constitutional rights, the Second Amendment right is subject to various forms of regulation, because no constitutional right is absolute right. Your right to free speech is subject to exceptions for libel and true threats and so on. So. So the question in Heller was like, okay, well, if we're going to strike down the city-wide prohibition on all handguns. What about other kinds of laws that are a little less strict, like the DC law was very, very, very strict, Chicago's law very, very, very, very strict. But what about things like, you know, the federal law that puts major restrictions on the possession of machine guns, or, what about the federal law that prohibits gun possession by people who've been adjudicated mentally ill, right? Well, one thing Heller did was say, and we learned later, this was put in there, sort of the price of justice. Kennedy's vote to get the five justices needed for a majority. The opinion says nothing in our decision should be taken to cast doubt on such long-standing prohibitions as and then it mentions possession by felons, possession of guns by the mentally ill, possession of dangerous and unusual weapons, possession of weapons in sensitive places like schools and government buildings. The court suggests like, okay, all those are okay, right? Those, they suggest that, right, but they don't really say why. And so for the next 10 or 15 years, the lower courts, without much help from the Supreme Court, we're trying to figure out, okay, well, okay, well, what kinds of laws are okay and which kinds aren't? And there were some splits in the lower courts, and I'm happy to talk about the details. But for the most part, gun laws were being upheld, and most for the most part, courts were doing what in constitutional law we call the tiers of scrutiny. They were asking, what's the government trying to do here. Does it have a really good reason, and is this law well-tailored to achieve or to further that reason? Right? That was sort of state of play. Then in 2022 and this is sort of the last big, big, big decision from the Supreme Court in a case called New York State Rifle and Pistol Association versus Bruin, the court in a six to three majority said, okay, no more of this, tiers of scrutiny stuff, no more means, ends, analysis. We don't want to see the lower courts evaluating whether gun laws are effective or anything like that. All we want to know, the only thing that matters for purposes of the Second Amendment is is this current law consistent with this nation's history of weapons regulation, history and tradition of weapons regulation so effectively, Bruin says, don't look at things like effectiveness. Don't look at like policy questions. Look at history, and that has raised a lot of hard questions. Because, you know, for reasons we can talk about, but for reasons you might imagine, but, but Bruin, in some respects, hit the reset button on the methodology question, and that's kind of we're still living in the aftermath of that.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, so just to make sure I understand everything, and yes, I still remember intermediate versus strict scrutiny and everything, and for our listeners, basically, those tiers of scrutiny are some. Saying, okay, sort of as Professor bloke already mentioned, yes, you have a right to own a gun. But the government can also consider other compelling interests, such as public safety. Not giving guns to criminals is a very compelling interest. And they can consider those things, weigh them against each other, and try to balance things like, sort of like balancing your right to own a gun with common sense safety, if you will. But the Brune case has sort of thrown that out the window and and ask only, the only thing that matters is, does this law match with the history of the nation? Quote, unquote, is that a correct understanding?

Joseph Blocher

It is, and I can show you, I mean, you know, obviously there's tons and tons of details, and we can put lots of shading onto it, but I think, you know, you're right that the tiers of scrutiny approaches are basically ways of doing what in other contexts people would say or meet might call a means end analysis, like, what's the end that the government's trying to pursue here? And did it choose a good means, right? And that does, almost inevitably mean taking into consideration, like, some kind of contemporary questions, like, you know, well, how many people every year die from gun violence, who is killing them with which weapons does this kind of a law help reduce that? Right? That's the kinds of questions that a scrutiny approach puts on the front burner, whereas the history approach doesn't, at least not transparently right? It asks courts instead to just look to the past. And that does that mean, in practice, that courts stop paying attention to, you know, the real world around them? It's hard to know, but it does make the sort of I don't know analysis a little bit more obscure. I mean, I can give one example here. I'll do it quickly, but this is another case which the Court recently resolved, a case called Rahimi from 2024 another major second amendment challenge. And the law at issue in Rahimi was a federal law. It's 18, USC, 922, g8 for anybody wants to look that up at home, which prohibits gun possession by people who are subject to certain kinds of domestic violence restraining orders. Now, those kinds of laws are thought to be very important because of what we know about the just horrible intersection between intimate partner violence and guns, it just increases the fatality rates. So so much. So important to be able to take guns out of those kinds of situations. So on a sort of means end scrutiny analysis, you would want to know, well, you know, what are the risks when there's a gun in the possession of a person who's under a domestic violence restraining order, you know, what's the likelihood that that gun can be taken away, like those, the kinds of things that intuitively to all of us, I think, would matter. But under the historical approach, you got to look back to 1791 or to 1868 to see what they were doing then, and they did not have domestic violence restraining orders in the way that we do, because they didn't treat women with anything close to even the respect they get today. In the law, domestic violence is not treated as a crime in the same way as it is today. So in the historical record, you kind of have to draw some maybe little more flexible analogies, and that's what the Supreme Court ended up doing in Rahimi, they upheld this law in an eight to one decision. Chief Justice Roberts wrote the majority but Justice Thomas, who wrote the majority opinion in Bruen, dissented in Rahimi and said, no, it's actually unconstitutional to take guns away from people, even if a judge has found that person to present a risk to others. I mean that, to me, is just a good illustration of just how restrictive the Bruin tests can be.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, I definitely agree with that. I think it's a very restrictive and I would say a frustrating test, because I think a lot of people today really feel very strongly about quote, unquote, common sense gun laws and that we want to be able to balance different considerations, but by taking away the scrutiny standards and replacing it with this historical test, it's just very difficult to balance considerations that a lot of people, I believe, think are important, and it's just frustrating. And so I just sort of want to ask bluntly, and I guess your answer about Rahimi sort of answers this a little bit, but is the Supreme Court and other lower courts even sort of allowed to factor in safety into their new like Second Amendment cases and legal work, or is it, as you sort of mentioned, a really difficult process that involves, like, complex historical reasoning.

Joseph Blocher

It it's a little bit of both. It's certainly the case that after Bruen and even after Rahimi, the the lower courts and the Supreme Court, if they're following their prior precedents have to turn to history much more than they did before. That's that's undeniably true, and that does make things slightly obscure. I mean, you know, the court, just a few weeks ago, heard an oral argument in a case involving restrictions on guns in public places, which was one of the issues in Bruen itself, which is a case about public carrying of concealed handguns. And you know, those cases often involve, like, deep debates about the statute of Northampton from 1328 I mean, it's just baffling, I think, to most people, whether you support broad gun rights or broad gun regulation, like, what a weird way to look at the world. It's just it's not the stakes that most people intuitively. Care about. And at least in my view, it's not particularly illuminating for most of these questions, because the technology and society and who we consider rights holders have just changed so much. You know, I mean, in some ways. I mean, I've described the test as restrictive, and it is restrictive in many cases, as far as what kinds of laws you can pass. But if you look back to 1791, when the Second Amendment was ratified, they also had some extremely broad gun laws that we wouldn't necessarily want to replicate today. I mean, there were broad there were laws broadly disarming black Americans, Native Americans, loyalists, Catholics like gun laws that just go way, way farther than any gun rights person would want. So I guess I just say that, that whatever side of this debate you're on, there should be something in the history that worries you, like you should be worried about the kinds of guidance that we're getting from history. Here to answer your question specifically, though you asked, you know, how do these questions of safety factor in? And I think what we're seeing, and Rahimi is a good example, is that courts, courts are using history as a guide, but they're focusing in on the fact that Bruin says, Look, when you're comparing a modern and a historical law, one of the things you should do is ask how and why the historical law and the modern law burden the right to keep and bear arms, right? Like those are your metrics of comparison. And if you start to ask those questions, okay, how and why did this historical law burden the right to self-defense? How and why does the modern law the answer to the why is almost always going to be public safety, right? So safety comes in, it just in a weird way. It's a more like, to me, at least a more obscure, less transparent way of doing some version of the same means and scrutiny that could have been done before, and we've seen it in the case outcomes. They're just all over the place after Bruen in ways they weren't before.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, I definitely want to get into talking about the further ramifications from Bruen, but first, I want to dive a little bit deeper into this question of history, because Bruin has said, we're going to look at history, and you've talked about that there are things in history, in American history, that support broad gun ownership, and then also some laws in American history that are very restrictive. And so I think sometimes, at least in doing my research, and also just listening to people talk every now and then, it's a lot of staunch like Second Amendment advocates, describe the founding era as, like some golden age of almost completely unregulated, you know, gun ownership. But like, I wanted to ask you, and you've talked a little bit about what this whole history argument means in some of your writings. Anyway, I want to ask, Is that really true? Is that the actual history we're looking at, or is there like historical press, as you've sort of alluded to, for balancing rights concerns with safety concerns, or maybe even other concerns that were not related to safety but were concerns back then nonetheless?

Joseph Blocher

Yeah. I mean, one thing that is 100% clear is that gun rights, or weapons rights, if you want to go back even, expand even beyond guns have always coexisted with weapons regulation and gun regulation. That is true at the founding. It's true if you go back to England and the common law that we inherited, again, I mentioned already the statute of Northampton. That's 1328, and it is a very specific law about carrying weapons in public places, so that that that tradition goes absolutely all the way back, and, you know, it's almost hard to summarize, because it's so broad and it's so varied and it's tailored and responsive to local considerations, because, as is true today, different communities have different experiences and different needs when it comes To weapons regulation. I'll just put in a plug here. Just put in a plug here. The Duke center for firearms law, of which I'm the faculty director, has over the past, gosh, six, seven years now, I guess, built a repository of historical gun laws. It's a free, searchable online tool for anybody who wants to poke around in. It has, like, I think, probably more than 2500 now, examples of historical weapons regulations with the scanned underlying pdf of the historical document, if you want to go read it yourself, from 1328 all the way up until the 1930s when we stopped collecting because there were just too many. So there's a you can search by topic and by area and by state and by time period. I mean, it's just, it's just, it's too hard to summarize, I guess would be the way I would say it. But there are regulations on type of person, type of weapon, location and so on. So I guess, to answer your question, on the one hand, yes, there these two things have always coexisted. It is a, it is a broad and frustrating misunderstanding that you know, weapons regulation, or gun regulation, is a new invention, you know, in the last couple the last couple decades, you know, having said that, I'll just reiterate two more things. One is that which we've already talked about, some of the laws that we'll find back there are bad laws. I mean, these are laws that like it's really hard to draw meaningful wisdom. From, I mean, you know, again, broad disarmament of black Americans, Native Americans, all of those are obviously unconstitutional under modern doctrine and in other areas of constitutional law wouldn't really be a concern, because the First Amendment, for example, is not governed by a Bruin like test that forces you to look to 1791 or 1868 but because Bruen forces us to look back there, we actually do have to grapple with, well, what do we do with these racist, you know, polluted laws? Like, on the one hand, we can just write them out of the history books because, you know, we don't, we don't like the motivations of the people who wrote them or the ways they were enforced, but on the other hand, well, that's what the history was. If that's what we're supposed to look at, trimming it based on our own consequentialist views. Today, seems like what Bruin tells us we can't do if we're going to consider modern consequences, then why not also look at, you know, 45,000 people a year dying of guns. Consider that a consequence. The last thing I'll say on this is that it is also true that there are some there's silences sometimes in the historical record, you know, you might look for, for example, to go back to the domestic violence example, you might look for an example of, like, you know, domestic violence focused restrictions in 1791 and you might not find a lot, but what you do with that silence means a lot too. I mean, you know, this is a time when women couldn't vote. We're not recognized as major property holders. I'm focusing on women here because they're primarily, then and now, the, you know, victims of intimate partner violence, not solely, but primarily, you know. So the fact that there wasn't a law on the books probably doesn't tell you very much. There's lots of litigation today about, you know, semi-automatic weapons, and for that matter, automatic weapons, neither of those were really a thing in the late 1700s there were some curios that sort of looked like automatic weapons, but they didn't have a law against them, because there weren't a problem, right? I mean, most people used guns that couldn't even be stored loaded. So you know, the sort of like drunken anger middle of the night, grab your gun from your nightstand. Form of violence we see just technologically wasn't possible because you couldn't keep your gun loaded in the nightstand like you would do with a semi-automatic handgun today. So little wonder that gun homicides were just not as as prevalent back then as they are today. So the fact they didn't regulate again doesn't tell us anything. It really because it wasn't necessarily a problem, and maybe they just didn't pass the law because they're focused on other things, not because they thought it'd be unconstitutional. Anyway, the over reading of those silences, I think, is a big problem under the under the Bruin test, as well as, as you point out, kind of misunderstanding what the history actually was.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, thank you so much for that great analysis of the history and for bringing to light. How many problems this sort of historical test might cause, whether it's when we have to deal with things that didn't exist back then, at that point in history, or when, technically, if we're going only by history as our standard, some very questionable things would be permitted. So it's a very great analysis. I have one more question, sort of on the history front, but it's actually more related, I would say, to this grand idea of gun ownership in America. And it's that a lot of people, drawing back to sort of the Revolutionary War and the country's founding, hold this belief that we need guns to rise up against a corrupt government. And so in reading some of the many articles that you've written, I noticed that you push back pretty hard against this so-called insurrectionist theory, and that's this interpretation of the Second Amendment in which the Constitution allows, or maybe even encourages, armed rebellion against the government. And like I mentioned when talking about gun control today, this is like a thing people bring up quite a lot, but is that an accurate reading of the Second Amendment? Or, as I sort of understand from your argument, is that actually not the case? And if so, why?

Joseph Blocher

It's a really, really hard question of constitutional law to try to get your head around the problem or the question of revolution or of insurrection, like our I mean, our country was born out of one. I mean, we won a secession, a violent secession, from another country. And so in some respects, like insurrection, revolution certainly part of our DNA. There's nothing, I think there's no, no two ways around that. I find it really hard though to read the second amendment to guarantee anything like a right to insurrection, given that the Constitution also treats treason as a crime, for example, that the people who wrote this document were, you know, themselves, partially responding to the threat of things like Shay's Rebellion, which helped sort of spark the writing of the Constitution in the first place, because it demonstrated the weakness of the Articles of Confederation Government like these are not people who wanted to constitutionalize. Constant revolution. So I To me that is that just can't be right. Here's the closest I think it could be to being right, which is essentially Justice Stevens descent in Heller. So in a way, the old version, to go back to our first your first question. First exchange, the pre-Heller interpretation of the Second Amendment, the one that's focused on the state militia, is the one to me that is closest to a sort of workable, if you like. I wouldn't call it, I wouldn't call it insurrectionist, but anti-tyranny vision of the Second Amendment, which is that, you know, again, the people who wrote and ratified the Constitution had just created this new federal government. Federal government with at that point, like powers they had never given to a federal government before. We just fought a war against a big, powerful central government. They create this new, new central government which has a standing army, which, again, the articles didn't really have. They might have been worried about that. So protecting the state militias is kind of a counterweight against it may have had a sort of anti tyrannical function or force. I think that's plausible, but that's not the same as, like the sort of individual level, or like private militia level, insurrection, rebellion. Vision that to me is, I mean That way lies anarchy, and that's not what constitutional law is all about. Whether that kind of thing is morally right or wrong? Is a very hard question, but you're not going to find your answer in the text of the Constitution. It's not a constitutional right in the way that we think about constitutional rights, if it's something else, it's like a pre-political, natural right, something like that. And you know that you'd have to get somebody else on the podcast to fully unpack that, because that's well beyond my expertise as a constitutional law guy.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, thank you very much for that answer. I think that's very logical and sort of pointing out that maybe this whole insurrectionist vision isn't even workable. I'd like to sort of shift the conversation more, and I think this could be more difficult than sort of talking about past cases and past history towards making some projections for the future. And I know that's difficult, but I'm sort of curious to know, given this new historical standard or historical test set in Bruen, are there other laws out there, whether at the state or federal level, that you're looking at, or other experts are looking at that they think are at risk, like for example, handguns are quite clearly protected by the Supreme Court. We know this, but there's a lot of debate still around assault weapons and some states have passed assault weapons bans. And obviously those look different in every state, but there's some kind of assault weapon ban. Do you think things like that or other regulations are at serious risk of being overturned when we have to go back and look at this, at the history?

Joseph Blocher

Andrew Chand

Yeah. Thank you very much for that in depth discussion, both about the state of play, possibly around assault weapons bans, and also talking about, as we mentioned in discussing the Rahimi decision, there's sort of lines that we've established beyond which people cannot possess weapons. And it will be interesting to see how those lines shift as the lower courts, and then probably the Supreme Court again, try to reckon with this new standard, I want to sort of shift the final part of our discussion towards a bit of a hopeful outlook, if we can. And so most of the time on this podcast, at the end of every episode, we ask people a pretty basic question, it's just, what does the solution to gun violence look like to you? However, I read a really interesting article from you. It's the article about technologies of violence and about how the law and markets may interact to improve or not improve public safety. And I don't want to get too much into it myself, but it seems like you propose some ways that we may be able to innovate on both of those fronts, on both the legal front and sort of the market front in order to improve public safety. So could you dive a little bit more into that work and talk more deeply about any possible solutions to gun violence that you may see arising from that?

Joseph Blocher

Sure, I'm happy to I mean, and the article you mentioned, thanks for reading it. That's great. I was co-authored with my my wonderful colleague, Chris Buccafusco, who is a scholar of law and innovation. So this basically because what happens you put together a firearms law person and a scholar who studies innovation and patents is you get them thinking about innovating ways out of gun violence. So we're not the first people to think about this by any means. But the basic idea is that with regard to many, many, many aspects of modern life technology has made us safer, and that often arises from a combination of things like economic incentives, but also legal restrictions, the prospect of tort liability and so on. I mean, the story of seat belts is a pretty famous one here. It's a combination of tort liability regulation, innovation and a cultural shift, right? When people, when seat belts were first, you know, put into cars, people would cut them out because they were so opposed to the idea of wearing seat belts, whereas today, I think we just kind of come to accept it, right? That's not even that long ago, our thought was, well, okay, what are the constraints that are holding back? Maybe similar, you know, safety enhancing innovations when it comes to firearms, because I think there are some, I mean, guns are inherently dangerous. That's their purpose, that's their function. And I think that's, that's both feet a feature and a bug. You're not going to have a gun that doesn't that's not dangerous to someone, but you could have guns that, for example, as is often referred to as smart gun technology, that are, you know, responsive, just. To authorize list of people, right? The same way that your phone is right. You know, your thumb or your face will kind of activate your phone. If there's a way for technology to do that reliably for weapons, it could really make a dent in guns that have been stolen, that would no longer be able to be, you know, misused, or guns that are picked up by children. You know, the number of children who die every year as a result of accidental shootings is heartbreaking, right? So we talked about some ways in which that could happen. It's really, it's tough. You know, the market is a tricky one to break into. We think it might make a difference if, for example, you know, smart gun technology really works. Well, then if the police or the military adopt them, I think that'll prove to consumers that they work. If they don't, then I think consumers are going to say, well, if this really worked, why don't police use them? Right? Those kinds of questions. It's also the case that the gun industry is insulated from forms of regulation and liability that have pushed innovation in other areas, because the industry is broadly immune from tort lawsuit and therefore has less incentive to make its products safer. It is very, very insulated from things like the consumer production safety Bureau, which is not allowed to regulate guns, even if it can regulate gun safes. So it's just kind of this unusual sort of legal world, but we do have some hope that markets could make a difference. To answer your question, I guess, even more specifically though, I guess I would say this is that any solutions, or step four steps forward in the gun problem. And I think it is a problem wide, wide acceptance of that even if people disagree about what the solution should be, it's going to be partial, right? I mean, if we're looking at about 45,000 people a year dying, but another 100,000 being shot, uncounted numbers of people, traumatized communities hurt by gun violence, a 1% improvement is like hundreds of lives. I mean, there's a huge, huge, huge gains to be made, even if they're just at the margins. And so we shouldn't be looking for like, a one solution that's just going to solve everything. We should be looking to like, make a difference where we can make a difference if there's an innovation that would, you know, help present, prevent accidental shootings of children. Fantastic. That's great. That's even if that doesn't solve the problems of gang violence or whatever else, that's fine, you know, sufficient unto the day of the evils thereof, as they say. And then I guess going back to your very first question, as a very broad one, to just kind of end on, I think a lot of people on the side see themselves on the side of gun violence prevention than or maybe more favor regulation over rights, and maybe critics of the Court's decision in Heller, for example, or the Court's decision in Bruen, I think should take heart from the fact that Heller itself is the outcome of a sustained campaign to change the meaning of the Second Amendment, I mean, to really get courts to see a new reading of this provision in the Constitution. It took decades for people with a broader view of gun rights to get the court to adopt their reading, but they did. And so if people want to push back on that, and you know, I don't know change, change Heller or Bruin or whatever, it may take time, but it took time to get them there in the first place. And so, you know, even those things that may feel like you have to take for granted in constitutional law, they're the result of people's choices and contingencies. And so I hope that that kind of thing, even if, even people who aren't fans of Heller, may see at least the possibility of authorship and constitutional law.

Andrew Chand

Yeah, I like a lot of what you said. I like what you mentioned about not looking for just one solution, and also really inspiring to think about whether it's the Heller case or even the Dobbs case. When we make big, big changes in interpretation of constitutional law, it's not necessarily just something that happens. It's the result of sustained pressure and effort by people. So inspiring to think that maybe if you want change, you can do the same as well.

Joseph Blocher

Andrew Chand

Well, Professor Blocher, that's all the questions we have for you today, and we're so glad you could join us for reference, if people want to learn more about your work, how could they go about doing that?

Joseph Blocher

Oh, yeah, feel free to look up the Duke center for firearms law. We have a blog called Second Thoughts. My fantastic colleague Haley Lawrence is the primary author there. But if you want to keep up with things that are happening in court or in some happening in court or in scholarship on gun violence, gun rights and regulation, that'd be the place to go. Thank you so much for having me on Andrew. This is really a pleasure.

Andrew Chand

Yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of your knowledge and expertise. It's been wonderful.

Andrew Chand

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of solving gun violence. For more information on Professor Blocher's work, you can visit the Duke center for firearm law@firearmslaw.duke.edu to learn more about the University of Virginia's gun violence solutions project, you can visit at gvsp.virginia.edu. Please make sure to follow us wherever you get your podcasts, so you can be notified as soon as we post our next episode, we'll see you next time you.