Last year, a federal appeals court overturned the District of Columbia’s ban on handguns. Now the U.S. Supreme Court will decide the case after nearly seventy years of silence on the Second Amendment. Observers expect the Court to finally settle the legal question of whether the constitutional “right of the people to keep and bear arms” is an individual right held by all, or a “collective right” of the state governments to maintain militias. What did the Founders intend when they drafted the Second Amendment? Please join us as constitutional legal scholar and Independent Institute Research Fellow Stephen P. Halbrook and George Mason University Law School legal historian Joyce Lee Malcolm examine these issues. Halbrook’s new book, The Founders’ Second Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms, is the fullest account yet of the Founders’ aims. Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms traces that right to English law and traditions and provides a comprehensive history of the transmission of that right to the American colonies. Independent Institute President David J. Theroux will moderate.