America Turns 250 as the Second Amendment Movement Keeps Winning

AmmoLand ^ | July 4, 2026 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

As America prepares to celebrate its 250th birthday, gun owners should take a moment to remember how unlikely today’s victories once seemed. In 1976, when the nation marked its bicentennial, many Second Amendment supporters believed the right to keep and bear arms was slowly being written out of American life. The law schools were hostile. The courts were hostile. The media was hostile. Most politicians treated the Second Amendment as a historical inconvenience. The future looked grim.

We chose to keep fighting. Giving up was not an option. The Constitution was clear, and we intended to fight to keep the Republic, even if the chance of success seemed nil.

The Grassroots Revolt That Changed Gun Politics

A strange thing happened. The Second Amendment movement became the seed of the movement to restore the American Republic.

I have doubts it would have happened without the clear words of the Second Amendment. They created a rallying point, an anchor of certainty in the righteousness of our cause, a clear guide to who was with us and who was against us.  Voting against the Second Amendment showed a politician might say he valued the Constitution, but his actions showed him to do the opposite.  We educated ourselves.

The NRA played a critical role. They slowed the advance of the administrative state. It appears they believed the fight was lost, but they were determined to fight long rearguard actions to delay the inevitable. They stopped the registration and licensing of handguns in the National Firearms Act of 1934. They stripped registration of handguns out of the Gun Control Act of 1968. In 1977, Second Amendment supporters took control of the NRA in the Revolt in Cincinnati, where NRA life members voted in Second Amendment supporters and outed the old guard.

The NRA would become powerful and rich with its rearguard

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TOPICS:
KEYWORDS: 2a; 50; banglist; independence

[marktwain]

Second Amendment supporters wanted more than rearguard actions. They wanted to win. We have been winning. The article shows how and why.

[Bon of Babble]

May it be ever so:

[DoodleBob]

Thank you for this well-written article, and potentially a blueprint for handling other matters. Candidly, I wasn’t aware of some of this “inside baseball” history.

I would like to add two points:

1. The scholarship of individualists standing athwart Levinson gets an assist. Yes, the average gun owner may not delight in reading lawyerly or statistical articles, but David Kopel and John Lott helped pour cold water on the collective model sycophants. For me, personally, Kopel’s The Samurai, the Mountie and the Cowboy: Should America Adopt the Gun Controls of Other Democracies? not only explored the national and cultural differences that underpin gun rights globally, but it explains so much OTHER behavior, including European global warming kool aid drinking and their not using air conditioning.

2. Firearms owners grow the trees of liberty not with blood, but by passing on this love (and responsibility) to their children. Indeed, they HAVE children! So many other elements of culture die out when the elders don’t pass it on - witness opera, classical music, and the theater. When the boomers pass away, there are piles of GenX and Millennials and now GenZ gun owners who go to the range, have ordnance (which, of course, keeps getting lost in a tragic boating accident) AND understand the gravity of the matter for them and THEIR children. Indeed in Scouting, the second most earned merit badge that is NOT required for Eagle is Rifle Shooting (Fingerprinting is basically given away at Summer Camp and shouldn’t count). Archery being #3 also isn’t an accident.

[Uncle Miltie]

NRA Life Member, checking in …

Very good article, Dean.

[PROCON]

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[rktman]

Never heard any president in my 79 years talk about the 2nd amendment as PDJT. IIRC gun control by the crown was the kick off for early battles.

[marktwain]

Yes, scholarship was and is important. I have Kopel’s book in my library, along with a fair number of others.

Unfortunately, a lot must be left out in an 1100 word essay.

[Sacajaweau]

We need recipricol laws....so you're covered wherever you are...The gun belongs to you...not any state.

Anything less than nationwide is contrary to the Bill of Rights.

[marktwain]

We are moving toward such. I think it will happen. We might get a Supreme Court decision saying States must allow non-state residents to carry before we get a national bill.

Right now, a national reciprocity bill is a bit more likely.

[libertylover]

Exactly!

[Democrat = party of treason]

Peoples 2nd Amendment rights have been trampled on for years in ugly blue States, and the SC has largely done little to nothing about it for years. Recent rulings have been good, but someone better find a way to fix the issues once and for all OR the leftist human debris will just find new unconstitutional ways to trample this Rights. America truly is at war, left vs right, and has been for a long time. There is middle ground with these demon controlled leftist lunatics, America needs to wake up and smell the coffee...

[Disambiguator]

More like wake up and smell the double-base nitrocellulose.

😁

[Chainmail]

I think that this resurgence of defense of the 2nd Amendment has come from the popularity of the AR-15 platform. As much as this pains me to say it - I was there when the M-16 arrived in Vietnam and it was a complete disaster - the version that exists now is easy to learn to shoot well, is handy, and inexpensive enough that it has become immensely popular. There are millions of them, all over our country.

There is no question that the AR-15 is an effective defense weapon at a time when our safety at home can be in jeopardy and it clearly stands for the citizen's right to bear arms.

The right to bear Arms is a foundational right of American citizenship and responsibility and the AR-15 is something even the Fudds out there can understand.