American Bar Association Needs to Brush Up on the Law

August 6, 2026
12:32 pm

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The American Bar Association’s recent call for sweeping gun-control measures reveals a troubling disconnect between the nation’s largest lawyers’ guild and the actual text, history, and Supreme Court precedent that define the Second Amendment. Rather than grappling with the plain language of the Constitution or the Court’s decisions in Heller, McDonald, and Bruen, the ABA’s resolution recycles policy preferences as constitutional gospel, treating the right to keep and bear arms as a grudging concession rather than a fundamental liberty. That approach not only misreads the law; it also signals to judges and legislators that elite institutions will supply the legal cover for restrictions the text itself will not bear. For the 2A community, the episode is a reminder that institutional prestige is no substitute for constitutional fidelity. When the ABA urges Congress to enact “assault-weapon” bans, universal background checks untethered to prohibited-person adjudications, and red-flag laws with attenuated due-process protections, it is effectively asking the legal profession to look the other way while legislatures re-write the Second Amendment through the appropriations process. Law students and young attorneys who absorb this message will carry it into clerkships, agencies, and courtrooms, amplifying the risk that constitutional text yields to institutional consensus. The push-back must therefore be both legal—continued litigation that forces courts to apply Bruen’s text-and-history test—and cultural, spotlighting how bar-association activism often substitutes policy preferences for the disciplined legal reasoning the profession claims to champion. Ultimately, the ABA’s misstep hands the broader gun-rights movement a clarifying moment: the fight is no longer simply about legislation; it is about whether the legal establishment will acknowledge that the Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, limits what clever lawyering can achieve. If the ABA will not “brush up on the law,” the courts and the voters will have to do it for them.

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For the 2A community, the episode is a reminder that institutional prestige is no substitute for constitutional fidelity. When the ABA urges Congress to enact “assault-weapon” bans, universal background checks untethered to prohibited-person adjudications, and red-flag laws with attenuated due-process protections, it is effectively asking the legal profession to look the other way while legislatures re-write the Second Amendment through the appropriations process. Law students and young attorneys who absorb this message will carry it into clerkships, agencies, and courtrooms, amplifying the risk that constitutional text yields to institutional consensus. The push-back must therefore be both legal—continued litigation that forces courts to apply Bruen’s text-and-history test—and cultural, spotlighting how bar-association activism often substitutes policy preferences for the disciplined legal reasoning the profession claims to champion.

Ultimately, the ABA’s misstep hands the broader gun-rights movement a clarifying moment: the fight is no longer simply about legislation; it is about whether the legal establishment will acknowledge that the Second Amendment, like the rest of the Bill of Rights, limits what clever lawyering can achieve. If the ABA will not “brush up on the law,” the courts and the voters will have to do it for them.

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