How far we’ve come
It’s 1974. No legal academic is thinking seriously of the Second Amendment; there is just a vague belief that it has something to do with the National Guard.
The NRA has about 600,000 members, and has no ILA. One person, as I recall, handles all political and legal affairs. The Cincinnati revolt that would create the modern NRA lies in the future (it came in 1977, arising out of problems revealed in 1976). Harlon Carter is enjoying retirement in Green Valley AZ, where he can shoot rifles out his back window. Neal Knox is a magazine editor in Prescott. I’m a law student.
That was how it stood, 36 years ago. Glad that I lived to see Heller, and now McDonald.
January 27th, 2010 at 8:43 pm
There was no necessity to think about the Second Amendment, then. Gun control, the way we know it now, started in 1980 or so. In 1976, I was shooting at the University of Illinois’s Chicago Circle Campus range. I had an Illinois FOID card so I could buy ammunition, that’s all. I could buy it my local Sears store.
In 1980, I and my opponent both brought real live guns into a real live courthouse as exhibits in a moot court criminal case. Nobody blinked an eye.
January 27th, 2010 at 11:37 pm
I’m a patron in the NRA! Yes and I’m glad to see we have come so far!