Gun control, as discussed on The Bob Zadek Show, is treated less as a technical question about the wording of the Second Amendment than as a clash between two ways of resolving public disputes: constitutional text interpreted by courts, and policy enacted by accountable local officials. Bob Zadek, an attorney and the show’s host, frames the issue as a test case for whether the Supreme Court sets policy or interprets law, while his guests supply the constitutional holdings and legislative history.
Heller and the individual right
Bob Zadek introduces the topic by recalling the furor after the Supreme Court decided Heller, which he describes as invalidating Washington D.C.’s very restrictive gun control laws. He objects to the media practice of asking ordinary citizens whether they agree with the decision, arguing that the public can only be asked about the policy underlying a case, not about whether it is supportable under constitutional law, because the Supreme Court does not set policy Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
Damon Root, senior editor of Reason Magazine and author of Overruled: The Long War for Control of the U.S. Supreme Court, lays out the two sides as the case presented them. On one side, local gun control laws are enacted by lawmakers and city officials accountable to local residents, who can vote them out if they dislike the regulations. On the other, the Second Amendment is constitutional text that must be taken seriously. Root states that a majority of the court found the amendment protected an individual right, and that D.C.’s ban on handguns within the home for self-defense violated the historical meaning of that right. He notes the decision was 5 to 4, and that the side putting the text of the Constitution ahead of what local officials wanted triumphed Overruling Government Overreach: Damon Root on the Libertarian Legal Movement (2014).
David Harsanyi, author of First Freedom: A Ride Through America’s Enduring History with the Gun, likewise calls Heller important for codifying that gun ownership is an individual right rather than a collective right, and not merely about militias but about people defending themselves. He compares the idea that a person must ask the state for permission to own a legal gun to having to ask government permission to exercise First Amendment rights [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Self-defense and dependence on the state
Zadek argues that the right to carry a gun is a subset of the natural right of self-defense, which he says nobody would challenge. In his framing, gun control accepts that right but limits the effectiveness of exercising it by taking away the most valuable tool of self-defense. Harsanyi agrees that if someone has an inherent right to protect themselves, their families and their property, and is not given the means to do it, then the ideal does not matter in practice; he calls that an attack on the Second Amendment and on the ideas behind it. He adds that gun control advocates often think of the issue as public safety rather than in these idealistic terms [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Zadek develops the point into a claim about dependency: to the extent that one’s right of self-defense is limited, the individual must turn to the government for protection, so gun control inherently builds extreme dependency upon the state and subordinates the individual to government. Harsanyi responds that most of the Bill of Rights consists of individual rights—what government cannot do—and that the idea a person should have to go to the state for permission to own a legal gun cuts against everything the Constitution is about [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
A history of federal gun legislation
Harsanyi works backward through the history. He states that before the 1930s there was not a single written federal law limiting gun ownership, though there were occasional state and more likely city laws, typically in the West, barring guns from red-light districts. No one needed a license; people bought any gun they wanted. In the 1930s, he says, the federal government began passing legislation during FDR’s administration—the National Firearms Act, in two iterations—after public fear of machine-gun murders and bank robbery, with Chicago’s criminal element having grown out of government intrusion into drinking through Prohibition. That legislation led to the first Supreme Court ruling on gun ownership, Miller, which Harsanyi says found the government could limit the kinds of weaponry people owned, but nothing in common use—only exotic or military weapons. He adds that until 1986 people could own fully automatic weapons simply by paying some money [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Harsanyi also uses this history to question the revisionist account that the individual right was invented late: if the issue were so contentious, and if only criminals had guns, why had no case clarifying it reached the Supreme Court until Heller? He dates the modern debate’s framing to the late 1960s and 1970s, when urban crime led roughly half of Americans in those places to say guns must be taken off the streets and the other half to say more guns were needed for self-protection [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
The Sullivan Law and arbitrary enforcement
Zadek raises the Sullivan Law, which he says is still on the books and prohibits gun ownership in New York City without a license. Harsanyi dates the Sullivan Act to the earlier 1900s and describes it as used initially for political reasons, with gangs involved, and as the first law in which a big city required handguns to be registered, especially to carry—a template for many cities afterward, especially in the 1970s. He also notes earlier gun control laws in the South after the Civil War aimed at keeping African Americans from having weapons to defend themselves, and laws before the Revolution aimed at local Indians or other disliked minorities; most early civil rights leaders of that time were pro-Second Amendment because they saw it as a way to defend their communities [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Zadek observes that the number of people carrying guns in New York City in violation of the Sullivan Law is probably in the hundreds of thousands, yet there are very few prosecutions—his evidence that licensing plus strict selection cannot work. Harsanyi agrees and adds that local political bosses, themselves basically crime bosses, arbitrarily decided how to use the law, helping allies and hurting people they did not like, which he calls the danger of many gun laws even today. Zadek generalizes: when laws are pervasive in scope and cannot be strictly enforced for lack of manpower, prosecutorial discretion means they are enforced arbitrarily against the political class’s enemies of the day [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
The Second Amendment’s text and the policy debate
Zadek quotes the Second Amendment in full—one sentence with three commas—and argues that debating what the founders meant by those commas is unsatisfying, because the gun control debate would occur regardless of the amendment’s wording. In his account, opponents of gun ownership do not act because of the wording; the Second Amendment has almost nothing to do with the debate at the policy level, which is a social debate about whether to ban guns and whether to make society dependent on government for protection [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Harsanyi agrees there is a component of revising history to help the contemporary side, and concedes the amendment is not particularly well-written, but says there is not a single quote from a single founder contending that owning a weapon is not an individual right. He describes the only debate around the amendment, between Federalists and anti-Federalists, as concerning who would control the militias, not whether individuals would hand back their weapons; the Minutemen did not hand back their weapons after Concord and Lexington, and militias existed because of individuals, not the reverse. He adds that most of the 13 colonies had something similar in their own constitutions that was clearer about it being an individual right [[episodes/entrepreneurs__outlaws__and_the_right_to_bear_arms|Entrepreneurs, Outlaws, and the Right to Bear Arms – David Harsanyi on First Freedom (2018)]].
Across episodes: no development
Two episodes touch the topic: the 2014 discussion with Damon Root, which centers on Heller, judicial review and the difference between constitutional interpretation and policy, and the 2018 discussion with David Harsanyi, which centers on the historical and legislative record and on self-defense and state dependency. The excerpts show no development or change in the treatment between the earlier and later episode; the two guests address different facets of the same question rather than revising one another.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state the state or circuit of the D.C. case, the full name or holding of McDonald, or what Miller held beyond a limit on the kinds of weaponry owned. They do not give the date of the Sullivan Act beyond the earlier 1900s, the text or provisions of the National Firearms Act, or the current legal status of any licensing regime. They also do not report any empirical measure of gun violence, crime or the effects of the laws discussed.