The National Rifle Association was founded in 1871 by two men, a
lawyer and a former reporter from the New York Times. For most
of its history, the N.R.A. was chiefly a sporting and hunting
association. To the extent that the N.R.A. had a political arm,
it opposed some gun-control measures and supported many others,
lobbying for new state laws in the nineteen-twenties and
thirties, which introduced waiting periods for handgun buyers
and required permits for anyone wishing to carry a concealed
weapon. It also supported the 1934 National Firearms Act—the
first major federal gun-control legislation—and the 1938 Federal
Firearms Act, which together created a licensing system for
dealers and prohibitively taxed the private ownership of
automatic weapons (“machine guns”). The constitutionality of the
1934 act was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1939, in U.S.
v. Miller, in which Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s solicitor
general, Robert H. Jackson, argued that the Second Amendment is
“restricted to the keeping and be