Hello and welcome to another episode of the weeds. I'm your host Dylan Matthews.

On Tuesday, an 18-year-old gunman shot and killed 19 children and two adults at an elementary

school in Uvalde, Texas. Less than two weeks after 10 people were killed and are racially

motivated to attack at a grocery store in Buffalo. And while America has a very visible and

unique problem with assault weapons and mass shootings, events like Tuesday or the shooting

in Buffalo don't paint the full picture of gun violence in America. In 2020, over 45,000

people died from gun-related injuries. Over half of those deaths were suicides.

Arguably, the most frustrating part about gun violence in America is the lack of response

from lawmakers. It happens over and over and over. And even if we didn't have a full

of us during the Senate or increasingly polarized Congress or a conservative majority on the

Supreme Court, reasonable sounding policies like universal background checks or licensing

requirements or age limits, they wouldn't be enough to make a difference in reducing

gun deaths, not to the level that people want to reduce them to. If we want to be on par

with other developed countries, we need to reduce gun deaths by more than 71%. And to do

that, we'd need to dramatically reduce the use of handguns in the country.

And implementing policies to reduce access to those firearms or to buy back ones that

are already out there is essentially politically impossible.

So this runs deeper than specific policy proposals. We need to look at the root of the problem,

the reason why guns are so pervasive in our culture. Part of how we do that is understanding

the legal foundation and interpretations of the Second Amendment.

Last fall, our colleague Ian Millheiser spoke with two scholars about the history of the

Second Amendment to figure out the legal grounds for today's current gun laws. We're replaying

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