In the 1920s and 1930s, Jehovah's Witnesses were viewed by many with the same horror and loathing gun owners receive today. So the 1920s and 1930s saw widespread state and local legislation against Jehovah's Witnesses, and though the Bill of Rights guarantees freedom of speech and religion, it took 30 to 40 years of careful litigation--patiently piling up precedents to achieve the overthrow of those laws by the Supreme Court.

The relevance of the Witnesses' experience to gun owners is that it will take at least that many years of patient, careful litigation to remove the morass of senseless anti-gun laws at all levels of government.

Unfortunately, the gun movement is afflicted by multiple glory-seekers and fanatics disguised as lawyers--but without any real background in constitutional litigation--bringing lawsuits that are sure to lose and create disastrous precedents to adversely influence the development of Second Amendment law. The most ill-advised of all would be premature challenges to the "assault weapon" bans that now exist in several states.

But before getting to that, I want to emphasize how limited and undeveloped Second Amendment law is now. The very narrow basis on which the 5-4 Supreme Court's Heller decision voided Washington D.C.'s handgun ban was that law-abiding responsible adults have a Second Amendment right to possess handguns for the defense of their homes and families. Note how far that is from what some unsophisticated gun owners and lawyers assume: Heller emphatically does not mean all laws gun owners dislike are ipse facto unconstitutional.

Without arguing that it will be so applied, consider how narrowly Heller might be applied: While unlikely, it is not inconceivable to narrowly interpret Heller as allowing legislatures to ban any firearm except the 9mm Beretta and Sig Sauer handguns standardized as combat weapons by the U.S. military. It could be argued that if you want to defend your family, a Beretta or Sig Sauer will do the job--so you have no right to any other weapon.

Less unlikely would be a legislature banning all the following as unprotected by the amendment because they're not strictly necessary for the defense of the home: all rifles, all hunting shotguns and all handguns smaller than .38 or 9mm. Again, I am not suggesting such bans will be adopted or that they would be upheld by the courts. All I am saying is that such bans are conceivably valid in the current undeveloped state of Second Amendment law.

How the amendment will be construed--broadly or narrowly--will be determined by the course of litigation in the next few years.

Which brings me back to the disastrous prospect of assault weapon litigation, of which I have much doleful experience. I lost the major California assault weapon case before the California Supreme Court. I was involved in three other California Supreme Court assault weapon disasters as well as losses in Connecticut and Colorado.

The simple fact is that there is not one case holding assault weapon bans violate either state or federal constitutional right to keep and bear arms provisions. Why? "Assault weapon" is an epithet seized upon by the anti-gun movement to demonize a heterogenous collection of down-powered firearms.

This demonization campaign has been so successful that many Americans, including the vast majority of judges, are wrongly convinced that banning assault weapons is minimal, sensible gun control and that there is no legitimate reason for a civilian owning an assault weapon.