Natural Law’s Return: Uncovering the Roots of Intractability on Guns as Prelude to New Growth

Abstract

This essay offers an overview of the recent legal history and politics which have contributed to current intractability on gun issues in the United States. Highlighted in this account is scholarship discussing the relationship between the natural law and common law in U.S. legal history, and the essay overall functions as a primer on the jurisprudence of guns addressed to those moral theologians interested in engaging the legal tradition pertaining to guns on a natural-law basis. The essay proposes that the contemporary natural-law tradition provides a valuable source of moral reflection for judges and legal scholars, as an alternative to the positivism and originalism which have been dominant in twentieth-century approaches to law.