This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, July 17th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown. Five years after the landmark ruling in the Heller Second Amendment Supreme Court case, the important rights found in the Second

Amendment still have not been given very much substance.

Alan Gura was among the lawyers for Mr Heller.

At the Cato Institute in June, he discussed what's happened since the Heller case in 2008.

Ideally the Second Amendment should function like a normal provision of the Bill of Rights.

That was the goal of Heller. And I believe that we may well be on the path to achieving that end

that would mean that from time to time cases would arise raising some novel

application of the amendment to a new set of facts and the courts

would disappoint both sides with some regularity as the right develops organically

into the future. Indefinitely we have yet to see, for example,

the one Fourth Amendment case that ends all search

and seizure debate in America and resolves

that part of the Constitution for all time.

That's not going to happen with the Second

Amendment most likely but the reality can can be definitely less than ideal at the

present time the situation is decidedly mixed some courts take the Second Amendment very seriously

and they've applied it to secure meaningful positive change in people's lives

that my clients and other people feel every single day. Other courts, are profoundly hostile to the concept of the Second Amendment.

They believe that Heller is not so much a legitimate opinion that must be followed as much as an obstacle, a puzzle to be solved,

something to be bypassed or defeated.

We do know from the outcome of the McDonald case

...