Four decades of defending self-defense.

reason has been on the gun beat since the very first issue of the magazine appeared 40 years ago. In "Violence in the U.S.--the Reversal of Cause and Effect," founding editor Lanny Friedlander described the political reaction to the assassination of Bobby Kennedy: "Gun laws, we find them screeching, from every radio received, gun laws, gun laws, gun laws! Make it illegal for anyone to own a gun and enforce that law at the point of a gun. Forget that a murderer does not stop for stop signs and would not obey a gun law either. Forget that it leaves the victim unarmed, but leaves the victimizer free to operate. Forget that it makes self-protection a crime, but leaves the criminal better off than he was before. Forget that an assassin can make a gun or steal a gun or even use another type of weapon. Forget all that."

Since then the defense of Americans' Second Amendment rights has been a staple of the magazine. In a May 1977 cover story, for example, the maverick liberal Don B. Kates Jr. made a more comprehensive case that gun control doesn't work. (In the same issue, the libertarian feminist Beverly Combs argued that "If You Liked Gun Control, You'll Love the Antiabortion Amendment.") In December 1985, the sociologist William R. Tonso listed the ways gun laws had been used to oppress black people in another...