AMERICA’S latest school shooting on February 14th has renewed calls for the repeal of the Second Amendment, the constitutional provision protecting the right “to keep and bear arms”. Critics claim the Second Amendment has helped make America the world leader in mass shootings. In the 227 years since the amendment was added to the constitution, as one student said after the massacre at her high school in Parkland, Florida, “guns have developed at a rate that leaves me dizzy”. But while “the guns have changed”, she said—alluding to the difference between a musket and an AR-15, the semi-automatic weapon with which the Parkland shooter killed 17 people—“our laws have not”.

For most of America’s history, the Second Amendment stood as an uninterpreted relic of the founding era. It was not until 2008 that the Supreme Court gave serious thought to the nature of the right it protects. In Heller v District of Columbia, four justices insisted that the right to bear arms made sense only in the context of a “well regulated militia” of the 18th century. But a majority found the Second Amendment to protect “an individual right to possess a firearm” for self-defence and held that a total ban on handguns violated that right.

It is impossible to say whether erasing the Second Amendment would bring down gun deaths in America. But this is an academic query: changes to the constitution require the unlikely assent of two-thirds majorities in the House and Senate and three-quarters of the states. The better question is whether repealing the amendment is a must for pursuing gun control. It is not. The Heller majority opinion did not, in the words of its author, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, secure an “unlimited” right to buy or carry weapons. The Second Amendment would not, for example, scuttle bans on concealed weapons or machine guns. And Justice Scalia emphasised that nothing in Heller “should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings”. Nearly every gun regulation under discussion today—from expanded background checks to bans on military-style weapons—would seem to pass constitutional muster.

To the dismay of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which takes a much wider view of the Second Amendment, the Supreme Court has consistently refused to embellish the constitutional right to bear arms in the decade since the Heller decision. The NRA was particularly piqued in November 2017 when the justices declined to entertain a challenge to Maryland’s ban on large-capacity magazines and semi-automatic weapons, placing AR-15s outside the ambit of constitutional protection. It will not be pleased by another demurral on February 20th, when only Justice Clarence Thomas noted his displeasure with the high court’s refusal to hear a challenge to a Californian law that requires the buyer of a gun to wait 10 days before taking possession. His 14-page dissent complained that the lower court treated the Second Amendment “cavalierly” and that the right to bear arms is a “disfavoured right” at the Supreme Court. Whether disfavoured or legitimately circumscribed, it is clear that the Second Amendment is not the primary obstacle to gun control. If legislators in the state capitols and Congress find the political will to clamp down on America’s millions of powerful and often loosely regulated weapons, it seems there is a constitutional way.