Despite its long and occasionally dreary originalist exegesis, the Heller
majority is not really defending the values of 1791. It is enforcing
the values of 2008. This is no accident. Indeed, the result in Heller
would have been impossible without the success of the conservative
movement and the work of the NRA and other social movement actors who,
over a period of about 35 years, succeeded in changing Americans' minds
about the meaning of the Second Amendment, and made what were
previously off-the-wall arguments about the Constitution socially and
politically respectable to political elites. This is living
constitutionalism in action.
