It was only a matter of time, I suppose. The gun control lobby tries to rebrand itself on a regular basis; going from out-and-proud “gun control” activists to “gun violence prevention” advocates and now “gun safety” champions, even though the mission remains the same: to prevent and restrict the exercise of our right to keep and bear arms. 

So I guess it shouldn’t come as a shock to see Brady now proclaim that we can “uphold the Second Amendment” while still enacting “common sense” measures that, would, in fact, trample all over the right to keep and bear arms. 

“Gun violence prevention” isn’t anti-gun, necessarily, but groups like Brady, Everytown, and Giffords most certainly are. There are all kinds of effective strategies to reduce violent crime (including crimes committed with firearms) that don’t involve putting more restrictions and prohibitions on lawful gun owners, and most of these groups are savvy enough to support community-based violence intervention programs. But those projects are ancillary to their top priorities of banning popular firearms, commonly-owned magazines, and confining the right-to-carry to as few places as possible. 

Moros is correct. In 2008 Brady argued in an amicus brief filed in the Heller case that the Second Amendment does not protect the “ownership of handguns for private purposes such as hunting and self-defense.”

Contrary to the lower court’s view, guaranteeing a right to keep and bear arms to “the people” does not imply that the right extends to private purposes unrelated to militia service. The issue is not to whom the right extends, but rather the nature and scope of the right guaranteed.II. Two hundred years of constitutional tradition support interpreting the Second Amendment to guarantee a limited right to be armed in service to an organized militia, while allowing elected legislatures, without judicial interference, to regulate private possession of guns. Legislatures are far better suited than courts to decide the difficult and hotly contested policy issues raised by the continuing tragedy of gun violence in our society. This Court should not grant the judiciary the unprecedented power to interfere with the life-and-death decisions of the people’s elected representatives in the control of deadly weaponry.

By 2022, when Brady filed its amicus brief in Heller, they still insisted there is no right to bear arms in the Constitution. They also argued that scrapping the arbitrary and capricious “may issue” policies allowing states like New York to deprive citizens of their right to bear arms unless they could satisfy the licensing authorities that they possessed a “justifiable need” or “good cause” to do so would itself violate our “right not to be shot.” 

Even if the Second Amendment protected some right to carry guns in public (it does not), it should be constrained to not infringe on each American’s right to life safely. Courts routinely limit conflicting constitutional rights, and a broad rule frames those decisions: courts avoid giving absolute priority to one professed right to the exclusion of others, particularly where safety is implicated.

Under Brady’s interpretation of the Second Amendment, no gun control law would ever violate the right to keep and bear arms because that individual right wouldn’t exist in the first place. 

This is the big lie told by gun control activists and anti-gun politicians like Kamala Harris who feign support for the Second Amendment without ever informing the public what they believe the Second Amendment actually protects. The truth is that their views on the right to keep and bear arms are anything but common sense, and the policies they want to impose on tens of millions of gun owners are anything but constitutional.