If you’re looking for someone to blame for the gun violence that has left our schools, streets, and communities soaked in blood, don’t point just at the National Rifle Association and their lackeys in the Republican Party. Raise another finger, ideally your middle one, toward a Supreme Court that has enabled the unceasing rise of gun-related carnage in all its ever-more-obscene forms.

The key decision came in 2008, when a 5-4 majority led by the late Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in District of Columbia v. Heller that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own firearms. Prior to Heller, the combined weight of academic scholarship and legal precedent had construed the Second Amendment as protecting civilian gun ownership only in connection with long-antiquated state militias. This view was long seen as reflecting the spirit of the actual debates held during the Constitutional Convention of 1787.

Scalia and the other members of the conservative Heller majority purported to base their radical reinterpretation of the Second Amendment on their “originalist” understanding of the Founding Fathers’ intentions. But their novel conclusion essentially ignored the first 13 words of the Second Amendment regarding the necessity of preserving the militias.

This amounted to a distortion of American history. State militias played a critical role in the American Revolution, and before that, in maintaining order in the 13 colonies. As the Second Amendment historian Noah Shusterman has written:

Few errors of constitutional interpretation have had such deadly real-world consequences as Heller. Justice John Paul Stevens, who authored the principal dissent in Heller, later condemned the ruling as “the worst self-inflicted wound in the court’s history.”

Since Heller, both guns and gun deaths have surged in tandem in what the American Enlightenment Project calls the “Heller Inflection.” In 2008, there were 305 million guns in circulation and 31,500 reported gun deaths; there are now 470 million guns in circulation and over 45,000 reported gun deaths per year. Mass shootings, defined as events involving four or more victims, have grown as well—from 272 in 2014 to 653 last year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

But as bad as Heller was, it still recognized that certain gun control measures remained “presumptively lawful.” In the words of Scalia:

In 2010, in McDonald v. Chicago, the court extended Heller’s Second Amendment analysis to cover state and local governments in........

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