This claim has been debunked at length over the decades, but once again the problem is that people who favor gun control would never waste their time reading what they assume is a pack of lies by right-wing gun nuts. A wider and more open-minded audience is hopefully here now, however, and the discussion is kept as brief as possible by focusing on the two most relevant cases.

 

US v. Cruikshank was the first Supreme Court case ever to directly address the meaning of the Second Amendment, and nothing exposes the cringeworthy desperation of “collective right” advocates better than a look at how Justice John Paul Stevens handled it in his Heller dissent. Heller was the last chance for their greatest minds to come together and defend their position at the highest level, so the arguments put forth by Stevens are the best they’ve got. Cruikshank related to charges, including violation of the Second Amendment, filed against members of a racist mob that attacked armed Blacks who had banded together as a private militia—victims who, significantly, are referred to in the indictment only as “citizens.” As noted by Stevens,

 

the Court wrote ‘The right there specified [in the indictment] is that of “bearing arms for a lawful purpose.” This is not a right granted by the Constitution. Neither is it in any manner dependent on that instrument for its existence. The second amendment declares that it shall not be infringed;’

 

Rearranging the excerpt in a way that retains 100% of its original meaning, the Cruikshank Court expressed its belief that “The second amendment declares that the right of ‘bearing arms for a lawful purpose’ shall not be infringed.” This is clear to any unbiased person with a grasp of logic and grammar, but Stevens argues,

 

The majority’s assertion that the Court in Cruikshank ‘described the right protected by the Second Amendment as “bearing arms for a lawful purpose,”’ is not accurate. The Cruikshank Court explained that the defective indictment contained such language, but the Court did not itself describe the right, or endorse the indictment’s description of the right.

 

The Cruikshank Court, however, absolutely did “endorse the indictment’s description of the right” by assuming that description in its own commentary. As for the meaning of “lawful purpose,” the only other appearance of this phrase in the dissent is a reference to “self-defense, recreation, and other lawful purposes.” Stevens understood logic and grammar perfectly well, but he chose to reject reality for ideology. He likewise continues,

 

Moreover, it is entirely possible that the basis for the indictment’s counts 2 and 10, which charged respondents with depriving the victims of rights secured by the Second Amendment, was the prosecutor’s belief that the victims…bore sufficient resemblance to members of a state militia that they were brought within the reach of the Second Amendment.

 

It’s “entirely possible” that US Attorney General George H. Williams completely failed to make what would have been—if, that is, “collective right” had actually been a thing—the key argument in support of Second Amendment-based charges in this high-stakes case? That contention is so ridiculous, it’s hard to imagine Stevens himself believed it. This actually seems quite likely, as he later admitted that his dissent was not based in fact or law when recounting his effort to persuade swing-vote Justice Anthony Kennedy: “All could foresee the negative consequences of the decision…I now realize that I failed to emphasize sufficiently the human aspects of the issue…” He never laments his deficiency in explaining some piece of evidence, only his failure to exert enough emotional manipulation.

 

Now that it’s clear what the Supreme Court had to say the first time it was asked about the meaning of the Second Amendment, let’s look at the very last case to address the issue before Heller supposedly “overturned decades of precedent.” in 1939’s US v. Miller,