From the New York Times, I'm Michael Marbara. This is the day.

Today, the second amendment is just 27 words long.

But those 27 words are among the most cryptic and controversial in the US Constitution.

Why the Supreme Court is reluctant to better define them.

It's Tuesday, April 3rd.

Adam, can you set the scene of this 1939 Supreme Court case? What's going on at the time?

So it involves a guy named Jack Miller, who was a small town thug in the heyday of Midwestern

Bank robbery in the Al Capone era in the Great Depression, who was a member of a gang that robbed a lot of banks.

He turns government informant. He goes kind of straight for a little while.

But he's caught between Oklahoma and Arkansas with a sawdoth shotgun.

And he's prosecuted by federal authorities for violating a then-recent gun control law called the National Firearms Act.

Adam Lipteck covers the Supreme Court for the Times.

So Miller, charged with this crime, says, wait a second. Isn't there a second amendment?

Don't I have a constitutional right to keep and bear this gun?

And he challenges the prosecution on second amendment grounds.

And this case makes it up to the Supreme Court, which in 1939 for the first time ever

tells us something about what the second amendment means.

And what question is the court trying to answer in this case, Adam?

The basic question for the court is how to make sense of the second amendment, which has two competing ideas in it.

Let me read it to you and you'll see what I'm talking about. It's got two clauses.

The second amendment says a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state.

So that announces something about what the amendment wants to accomplish.

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