Nuts like the NRA have advanced a radical interpretation of the Second Amendment for the past few decades, but politics and legal thinking signal a return to traditional jurisprudence.

While Congress remains stymied by Republican opposition to any gun regulations, there are four reasons to think that the court system, and the Supreme Court in particular, may be evolving: Orlando, changes in the Court, and two recent court cases.

Remember that the NRA's understanding of the Second Amendment is an extremely recent phenomenon. For more than 200 years, the legal and scholarly consensus was that, in the absence of a standing army, the Second Amendment was designed to enable states and localities to maintain a "well-regulated militia" by placing muskets and other weapons in the hands of local citizens.

Then came three decades of conservative political activism, focused on law schools, the National Rifle Association, and conservative think tanks. This effort culminated (but by no means concluded) with the 2008 case of D.C. vs. Heller, which the Supreme Court found, for the first time, an individual right to gun ownership in the Second Amendment.

This view is now the dogma of tens of millions of Americans, propped up by an entire industry of selective histories and scholarship that can usually be traced back to the handful of philanthropists who paid for it. Indeed, the preamble of the Second Amendment has been written out of the Constitution to the point where the NRA's national headquarters has a frieze engraved on a wall bearing only the second clause of the amendment, "the right of the people to bear arms shall not be infringed."

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