Where the Gun-Control Movement Goes Silent

In 1991, the conservative former chief justice, Warren Burger, launched a broadside against the document that for 30 years on the Supreme Court, it was his job to interpret.

“If I were writing the Bill of Rights now,” he said in an interview on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, “there wouldn’t be any such thing as the Second Amendment.” Burger went on to say that the 27-word amendment referencing “the right of the people to keep and bear arms” had been the subject of “one of the greatest pieces of fraud—I repeat the word ‘fraud’—on the American public by special-interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime.”

Gun-control advocacy groups occasionally bring up Burger’s words to buttress their campaign against the special-interest group to which he was undoubtedly referring, the National Rifle Association. But in the decades since, as the push for tighter limits on guns has surged and stalled, again and again, none of them have taken up the suggestion implicit in the justice’s critique: There has never been a serious effort to rewrite or repeal the Second Amendment.

“It’s really not part of the