Saul Cornell, Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham University, is the author of A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America.From the transcript of his interview with CNN's Fareed Zakaria:
ZAKARIA: Professor Cornell, people say, well, the Second Amendment is sacrosanct and that is why there is a limit to what can be done about all of this. You've studied the history of it.--Marshal Zeringue
And what I recall in the 1930s and '40s, the federal government placed a lot of restrictions on gun ownership, and the Supreme Court went along with them. So how is that possible that if we have this fixed view of the Second Amendment?
CORNELL: Well, the simple fact is that we've always had gun regulation. Gun regulation existed at the time of the Second Amendment. It actually got more intense after the adoption of the Second Amendment.
And even if you accept Justice Scalia, who was pretty pro-gun and whose Heller decision, for the first time, defined the Second Amendment not in terms of a militia based right but in terms of a right that had little to do with -- nothing to do with the militia, even he conceded that there is wide room for regulation and that guns have been regulated for a very long time.
So, really, the Second Amendment poses no barrier to gun regulation, particularly if you think that the political process would weed out any extreme gun regulation measures. We could pretty much do almost anything that's being debated now, would be consistent with the Second Amendment. The real problem is...[read on]