The Second Amendment has a hidden origin story

Malcolm Gladwell argues that almost everything most people believe about the Second Amendment is wrong. Guns weren’t widely owned in 18th-century America. The militias didn’t win the Revolutionary War. And the amendment that guaranteed their survival was written to protect one thing in particular: the armed slave patrols that Southern plantation owners depended on.

In conversation with Jonny Thomson, Gladwell traces that history into the present — why originalism gave the right a blank cheque, why most lethal violence looks nothing like the murders in detective fiction, why America’s falling homicide rate may say more about its trauma surgeons than its streets, and why the country’s problem may be too few police rather than too many.

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