by Wendy Kaminer

About the author: Wendy Kaminer is a lawyer, social critic, and contributing editor to the Atlantic Monthly. She is the author of It’s All the Rage: Crime and Culture.

I’ve been invited to the shooting range to “observe and try out the right to bear arms in action,” along with about twenty other participants in a two-day seminar on guns and the Constitution, sponsored by Academics for the Second Amendment. Funded partly by the National Rifle Association, Academics for the Second Amendment isn’t exactly a collection of academic gun nuts—most of its more than 500 members aren’t academics, and its president, Joseph Olson, an NRA board member and a professor at Hamline Law School, in Minnesota, seems a rational, open-minded man. But the...