In 1791, the year the Second Amendment was ratified, a trained marksman could get off four shots in a minute. The 18-year-old shooters in Buffalo and Uvalde had AR-15s that could discharge hundreds of bullets, rendering their victims unrecognizable without DNA testing.

What is standing in the way of the common sense gun regulation that super-majorities of Americans want is not the Second Amendment, it’s politics. How we got to the Heller decision in 2008 expanding and lionizing gun rights “is a story about political mobilization on the Right in the 1980s. It was a multi-pronged effort by the NRA and its allies to weaken gun laws at the state level, and support academic and opinion pieces that extolled firearms for self-defense,” says Darrell Miller, co-director of the Duke Center for Firearms Law.

“It didn’t fall from the skies with the Heller decision. It was a long, 20-year runway of changing the conversation that culminated in Heller,” says Miller, citing the impact of an article published in the Yale Law Journal in 1989 by constitutional scholar Sanford Levinson, a noted liberal, that was titled, “The Embarrassing Second Amendment.” Levinson chided his fellow liberals for being quick to defend individual rights, like those of criminal defendants, while shunning the Second Amendment. The piece was heralded by conservatives, prominent columnist George Will among them.