It looks like the handwriting may have appeared on the Supreme Court wall for the constitutional view of gun ownership once exclusive to conservatives

"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."
--the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution (note: the last comma, which seems clearly erroneous, was not included in the version submitted to and ratified by the states)

"In March," Adam Liptak writes in today's New York Times, "for the first time in the nation's history, [in Parker v. District of Columbia] a federal appeals court struck down a gun control law on Second Amendment grounds. Only a few decades ago, the decision would have been unimaginable."

I have to say I missed it, but Liptak notes that in a mere two decades, "breakneck speed by the standards of constitutional law," there has been a breakdown in what was once "an almost complete scholarly and judicial consensus that the Second Amendment protects only a collective right of the states to maintain militias."

As recently as 1991, then-retired Chief Justice Warren Burger--a Nixon appointee who can hardly be described as anything but a judicial conservative--said in a speech, "The Second Amendment doesn't guarantee the right to have firearms at all." In an interview the year before, Liptak notes, Burger called the view that the Second Amendment guarantees a right to individual (as opposed to collective) gun ownership "one of the greatest pieces of fraud--I repeat the word ‘fraud'--on the American public by special interest groups that I have ever seen in my lifetime."

One's first assumption is that jeez, the NRA has pulled it off. In fact, says Liptak, the change has been spearheaded by prominent liberal consitutional experts.

Laurence H. Tribe, a law professor at Harvard, said he had come to believe that the Second Amendment protected an individual right.

"My conclusion came as something of a surprise to me, and an unwelcome surprise," Professor Tribe said. "I have always supported as a matter of policy very comprehensive gun control."

The first two editions of Professor Tribe's influential treatise on constitutional law, in 1978 and 1988, endorsed the collective rights view. The latest, published in 2000, sets out his current interpretation.

Several other leading liberal constitutional scholars, notably Akhil Reed Amar at Yale and Sanford Levinson at the University of Texas, are in broad agreement favoring an individual rights interpretation. Their work has in a remarkably short time upended the conventional understanding of the Second Amendment, and it set the stage for the Parker decision.

"The standard liberal position is that the Second Amendment is basically just read out of the Constitution," says Professor Levinson of the University of Texas.

If only as a matter of consistency, Professor Levinson continued, liberals who favor expansive interpretations of other amendments in the Bill of Rights, like those protecting free speech and the rights of criminal defendants, should also embrace a broad reading of the Second Amendment. And just as the First Amendment's protection of the right to free speech is not absolute, the professors say, the Second Amendment's protection of the right to keep and bear arms may be limited by the government, though only for good reason.

"The individual rights view is far from universally accepted," writes Liptak.

"The overwhelming weight of scholarly opinion supports the near-unanimous view of the federal courts that the constitutional right to be armed is linked to an organized militia," said Dennis A. Henigan, director of the legal action project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence. "The exceptions attract attention precisely because they are so rare and unexpected."

With federal courts beginning to divide on the issue, it's clearly going to have to be decided at some point by the Supreme Court, which hasn't touched the issue since 1939, in a ruling that apparently offered aid and comfort to both sides.. What we don't know, of course, is where the "liberals" on the Court stand on the issue--or, for that matter, where the only remaining actual "conservative," Anthony Kennedy.

Still, with liberal theorists split on the issue and conservatives in ferocious lockstep, and with a hard-core bloc of four radical right-wing zealots now firmly ensconced on the Court, salivatating to tear up the Constitution as we've known it, the handwriting may have appeared on the courtroom wall.