Daniel J. Schultz

About the author: Daniel J. Schultz, a U.S. Military Academy graduate, is a practicing attorney in Los Angeles and is the president and cofounder of the Lawyer's Second Amendment Society, a nationwide network of attorneys who support individuals' right to keep and bear arms.

The wording of the U.S. Constitution's Second Amendment gives citizen militias the rights to exist and to own guns. The Framers of the Constitution used the words "well regulated militia" not to indicate that the federal government should regulate the militia but rather to refer to the necessity of citizen militias to train and equip themselves in an orderly fashion. There is no evidence that the Framers defined the militia as being anything other than "the whole of the people." The Framers believed...