"Rooted in Politics as Much as Law"

"The new group pushed for a novel interpretation of the Second Amendment, one that gave individuals, not just militias, the right to bear arms. It was an uphill struggle. At first, their views were widely scorned. Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, who was no liberal, mocked the individual-rights theory of the amendment as 'a fraud.'
"But the N.R.A. kept pushing—and there’s a lesson here. Conservatives often embrace 'originalism,' the idea that the meaning of the Constitution was fixed when it was ratified, in 1787. They mock the so-called liberal idea of a 'living' constitution, whose meaning changes with the values of the country at large. But there is no better example of the living Constitution than the conservative re-casting of the Second Amendment in the last few decades of the twentieth century."

In The New Yorker, Jeffrey Toobin discusses changing views of the Second Amendment.

Adam Winkler in The New Republic traces the gun-control debate back to 1934.