duced in large measure by changing firearms technology. As automatic weapons become increasingly easy for anyone to buy and as technologies like armor-piercing bullets become common on the streets, the idea of limiting guns has simply become more urgent to many Americans balancing a national desire to preserve individual freedoms with a desire to ensure public safety.
Related to this general sea-change at the polls is the fact that law-enforcement agencies (which tend to be relatively politically conservative) have begun to advocate gun control. If one considers this, it should be hardly surprising, for while a police officer may believe strongly in individual freedoms as guaranteed by the Constitution, when that officer knows that she or he may be killed any day because people have access to armor-piercing bullets, then police who stand a greater chance of being killed by criminals than do average citizens become advocates of gun control (Reduce the firepower, 1998, The San Diego Union-Tribune). Indeed, one Orange County candidate for sheriff ran a campaign expressly dedicated to the idea that he intended to pursue gun-control violators more stringently than his predecessor on the grounds that controlling guns is a primary way to control crime (Seilor, 1998). Such a position would have seemed highly improbably a decade ago.
As noted above, at one level all discussion about gun control in the United States takes as its basis the second item in the Bill of Rights the Second Amendment, which is usually abbreviated to the phrase "the right to keep and bear arms." The entire text of the amendment is nearly as brief: "A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed." But while the full amendment is almost as brief, it does add important elements that go to the heart of contemporary arguments about gun control in the Uni...