For decades, gun-control advocates have left this narrative partially unanswered, offering depressing statistics but no compelling constitutional principle. They cannot afford to do so any longer. The March for Our Lives brief marks the beginning of a long-needed effort to offer a pro-gun-control constitutional narrative, one that calls attention to the constitutional rights and goods vindicated by gun regulation. These include a collective understanding of self-defense, as well as constitutional guarantees such as the right to public assembly and interests such as access to public education. The point is that the right to bear arms is not the only constitutional commitment implicated in the guns debate, and the Court ought to consider those other commitments as worth balancing with the right to bear arms, not as inherently subordinate to it.

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We call our foundational legal text a Constitution because it constitutes our legal and political reality. The March for Our Lives brief is a reminder to the Court that it cannot ignore the world it creates through its interpretation of the Second Amendment. The brief asks the Court to confront the consequences of the gun lobby’s myopic approach, and it does so by bringing in the voices of young people whose lives have been upended by gun violence.

It recounts the narratives of Aalayah Eastmond, a Marjory Stoneman Douglas student who “saw blood pooling on the floor” and a fellow student “slumped against the wall, dead”; Jackson Mittleman, a sixth grader who comforted the siblings of victims of the Sandy Hook shooting as they contemplated the loss of their 6-year-old brother; and Brooke Harrison, another Stoneman Douglas student, who saw “a lifelong friend” shot at his desk and was forced to “watch ... his body go limp.”

Gun-control advocates have long been making these sorts of arguments outside the legal sphere, at town halls and televised rallies. The March for Our Lives brief takes its inspiration from these more democratic arenas and brings that approach into the courtroom.

This differs markedly from the legal arguments gun-control advocates have used for decades. In courtrooms and law schools, advocates for regulation have traditionally made their case with more anodyne tools—textual analysis and statistics. They have staked their claim on the textual reasoning that the word militia in the Second Amendment puts regulation of individual civilian gun ownership beyond the amendment’s scope. Regarding statistics, consider the brief filed by the American Academy of Pediatrics in the landmark 2008 gun-rights case District of Columbia v. Heller, which cited more than 50 academic or governmental studies on gun violence and related issues.

Conservative supporters of gun rights have long known that such approaches, on their own, are insufficient. Consider the amicus brief filed in Heller by then–Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz, which cited figures such as George Mason and James Madison to paint a picture of an individual right that was core to the American idea. As Cruz wrote, “The Framers were understandably wary of standing armies and the powers of a potentially oppressive government.” On this view, an individual right to bear arms ensures “a citizenry capable of defending its rights by force, when all other means have failed, against any future oppression.” This narrative does not just rely on dry points of law—it tells a story in which gun regulation is simply un-American and runs contrary to familiar values such as liberty, individualism, and opposition to tyranny.