American Enlightenment Project

American Enlightenment Project is the only organization dedicated to ending the gun epidemic by overturning the Supreme Court decision that created it and correcting all the guesswork behind it.

AEP is the one gun violence prevention (GVP) organization to recognize that, to make sense of and end this epidemic, ONE MUST first identify the disease — Heller’s dangerous right to have a gun — then develop an effective cure:

• Mainstream GVP organizations advocate common-sense safety to “live with” Heller, and hundreds of millions are spent to fund their responses — modest reforms, grassroots efforts, electoral change — focused on symptoms, not the disease.
• A better approach is to develop a cure for Heller. Covid-19 vaccines followed decades of research, defying orthodoxy that mRNA would not work. That is the only way to end this epidemic, too, contrary to GVP orthodoxy it cannot be done.
• AEP’s counsel spent years finding both a cure for Heller and the 2^nd Amendment’s lost meaning, upending common wisdom.

Despite clear evidence, mainstream organizations never identify the disease or ask why gun violence exploded in recent years. Why? Unable to change Heller, they choose to downplay or ignore the pernicious decision that puts Americans in peril.

Heller’s devastating, destabilizing consequences include:

Mainstream messaging that Heller is “not the problem” is wrong and deflects scrutiny. When the media reports “Little consensus on why gun sales and deaths are surging” and “There are too many shootings to cover” (Wash. Post 7.10.22, 7.11.22), it seldom mentions Heller’s radical change, just like mainstream organizations. Independent media finally called out Heller after the Highland Park July 4^th parade massacre, in “America’s unique gun problem, explained” (Vox 7.4.22):

Mainstream slogans ‘we are winning’ and ‘play the long game’ are divorced from reality, even within the movement. The former leader of the Arizona chapter of Moms Demand Action explains:

Avoiding Heller, mainstream organizations — offering reassuring nostrums and marginal responses to its dangerous right, still insisting on their own absurd individual right (to serve in the miliitia) — simply are not focused on and can never cure the disease.

There is a short game, with a game-changing cure: undo Heller in the courts. We invite you to explore our Home page and the rest of AEP’s site, showing Heller’s consequences and glaring errors: Gun Crisis, 2nd Amendment Explained, and Heller’s 2nd Amendment. They provide information all should know about the Heller-fueled crisis and how to end it.

With its board and advisors, American Enlightenment Project is led by counsel with an accomplished record of resolving legal enigmas. After Sandy Hook, co-founder Robert Ludwig began years of in-depth research of the founding-era, Constitution, Enlightenment, and centuries of Anglo-American and other precedent, immersed in its “political and intellectual atmosphere” and “enormous mass of material,” as Justice Scalia put it. Undeterred by conventional wisdom that the 2^nd Amendment is unknowable and Heller unassailable, AEP’s co-founder uncovered conclusive evidence of the amendment’s forgotten origins and meaning, making connections not obvious from how the record usually is read, and exposed glaring errors and omissions that require Heller be overruled.

• Mr. Ludwig applied the painstaking analysis used to end a half-century inability of scholars and courts to explain similarly vexing text governing sovereign immunity, persuading justices in a 2015 case, including Justice Scalia, that “substantial contact” means “minimum contacts” as an overlooked term of art, recounted inThe Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act: ‘Bedlam’ Redux (Law360 9.22.17). In a leading aviation case, he untangled even older conflicts over the high seas, a resolution adopted in unanimous Supreme Court decisions in the 1990s by Justices Scalia and Thomas.
• His first Second Amendment article, 2nd Amendment Still Undecided, Hiding in Plain View (Law360 1.11.16), was published weeks after the Gun Epidemic was declared and weeks before Justice Scalia’s death. Other articles available on AEP’s site include Court Pauses Joyriding with AR-15s, as Reality Catches Up to Coherent Nonsense (Nat’l Law J. July 21, 2025); High Court Gun Rights Case Ignores Key Case Law Problem (Law360 11.5.20); and Historic Legal Blunder that Enabled Our Gun Epidemic (Law360 4.28.18).

The Court already has vindicated one AEP insight, that the amendment’s command “shall not be infringed” protects a public right. In 2018, a 7-2 Court reaffirmed that patent infringement involves a “public right,” over a dissent that “most everyone considered a patent a personal right.” 

That decision correcting a related myth about patent infringement, ironically by Justice Thomas, a Heller stalwart and Bruen author, demonstrates how superficial assumptions can be undone—in this Court. So does the Court’s decision this term that blocked unlawful deployment of the National Guard, based on a single scholar’s brief clarifying that “regular forces” in a militia statute meant regular military forces, not law enforcement as both sides superficially argued, avoiding nationwide unrest.

AEP is leading an effort to correct the superficial gun rights argued by both sides in Heller, contrary to longstanding jurisprudence and the Second Amendment’s actual meaning, in order to end this needless gun epidemic.

Heller is at the root of the Gun Epidemic

• As AEP’s Gun Crisis page shows: “To understand the real problem, google ‘Argument turns deadly.’” (A. Wiles tweet, 7.24.22). This crisis is not explained by mental health, poverty, or Covid, all found in other nations with a fraction of our gun violence.
• After Heller, gun deaths and shootings of all types rose and then accelerated, creating an inflection shown by virtually every metric.
• “Most murders are committed by law-abiding citizens where spontaneous violence is generated by anger, passion, or intoxication” (Justice Breyer).
• Empowering all citizens with guns, Heller turned those unable to control impulses into “criminals.”

“I am appalled by [the record shootings] but not mystified how it happens. The availability of guns everywhere and their use by people of all ages should be obvious. Until judges start reading the 2^nd Amendment in a strict constitutional sense — i.e. that ‘militia’ means just that: an organized governmental armed force — this slaughter will continue.” (John Elsbree to Wash. Post ed. 1.9.24)

Both individual rights argued in Heller were wrong, even absurd

In Heller, both sides argued individual rights—to serve in the militia and to self-defense—neither debated at founding, and dismissed by the majority and dissents, respectively, as “an absurdity” and “absurd.”

• Throughout the 20th century, the unanimous view of federal judges, including conservative nominee and likely decisive vote, Robert Bork, was the 2^nd Amendment “guaranteed the right of states to form militia, not for individuals to bear arms,” which “allowed states” to resist a “tyrannical national government.”
• In 1991, former Chief Justice Burger denounced an individual right as “the greatest piece of fraud”
• In 2008, the Heller Court did not address the existing state right to keep armed militia — the only right debated — because GVP advocates, who never lost a prior challenge to gun laws, chose to drop it.

Heller’s implied right of self-defense is absurd, as its many glaring errors show. But the right to serve in a militia that GVP advocates argued—a “sophisticated collective rights theory” — is just as absurd.

• D.C.’s counsel argued the right to serve was “invocable in court,” citing no case where it was invoked in 200 years, or any real support, and missing that the Court in 1827 rejected the idea of militia suits as “subversive of all discipline.”
• GVP advocates never defined their collective, nor could they: the only collective people in our system is the body politic—the state.
• Nor did they address the militia system for defense of the state, the focus of the unanimous U.S. v. Miller (1939) decision that led to uniform court recognition of the state right.
• Nor say how their right to serve in a militia (or on a jury as also imagined) could be a duty subject to fines or prison, unlike other rights.
• Explained as a “right to a gun…to fulfill the duty to serve in a militia” (NYU’s Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment, 2014) it made no sense.
• Argued as a right to a gun for militia duty but not self-defense — break glass for one emergency, not the other — the theory was not even plausible.

Dropping the longtime state right for a theoretical individual right, GVP advocates left the Heller majority no choice but to find the other individual right by default.

Following the herd — without independent thinking or review of their unsupported theory — GVP advocates all but invited Heller’s dangerous right that is leading the country over a cliff.

Justice Stevens in dissent, speculating “surely” the right to serve exists, could offer only lip service. Hedging, he noted: “the Amendment was designed to protect the right of each of the States to maintain a well-regulated militia.” In McDonald, he repeated: “It was the States on whose immediate behalf [it] was adopted.”

Deriding each other’s right, neither could explain why theirs was not debated. Nor account for Madison’s draft conscientious-objector exemption (“no person scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled to render military service”) — plainly superfluous under both a right of self-defense and to serve, but not a state right.

Such contradictions should have caused GVP legal advocates to see individual rights were dead ends and revert to the long-recognized state right, the only right consistent with the founding record. Blind to the consequences, they never mentioned it.

Heller is a historic blunder

Justice Stevens called Heller “the worst self-inflicted wound in Court history.” It’s worse than he knew.

• Citing dictionaries and little founding support, Heller rewrote the 2nd Amendment into constitutional artifice — “A disciplined citizens’ militia, being necessary to the security of a free polity, the right of individuals to have and carry a handgun in the home, shall not be abridged.”

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed. – Amendment II

Among its glaring errors, Heller rewrote:

• well regulated as “disciplined” — reducing the country’s first constitution (from “well-regulated and disciplined militia” to “disciplined and disciplined militia”), and the amendment, to imbecility
• militia as “citizens’ militia” — conflating “citizen soldiers” and “militia” into an oxymoron
• the people as individuals — ignoring context: the opening clause it reduced to nonsense, and last clause it overlooked
• keep and bear as “possess and carry” — missing idiomatic uses of each term
• arms as personal weapons — repeating a “billy club” case’s mistake
• infringed as “abridged” — defining neither, carelessly transposing terms that are not even synonyms

Worse, the textualist Heller Court, purporting to decide the full text — each and every word — never address multiple terms, including the verb on which the amendment rests. Unlike abridged — used in the 1^st Amendment (the Senate correcting House substitution of infringed) and all others since for personal rights — infringed was used in the 2^nd Amendment and other organic laws like the first constitution (“the legislative right of any state . . . be not infringed”) to protect a public right.

Heller’s related right to “weapons typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes” rests on a fiction that military and personal weapons “‘were one and the same.’” Ignoring militia statutes specifying arms, it comes from a “billy club” case which miscited a swords encyclopedia that refutes it. (It was also Heller’s unattributed source for “citizens’ militia,” the first case to ever use that misnomer.)

Heller is not just wrong, but dangerous

The Heller majority said it was “aware of the problem of handgun violence in this country,” yet took “policy choices off the table” and guaranteed all Americans the right to have a gun. Heller’s dangerous new right triggered a predicable — and predicted — epidemic of guns and gun violence: impulsive, angry, intoxicated shootings; domestic violence, suicides, accidents; devastated homes, businesses, communities; ever-growing threats to personal safety and fear; and breakdowns in public safety, order, and the domestic tranquility promised in the Constitution.

Heller “curtails the power to regulate that contributes to” the “slaughter caused by the prevalence of guns” (Stevens, J.)

“The majority’s decision threatens severely to limit the ability of . . . officials to deal with gun-related problems” that “threaten the breakdown of law and order.” (Breyer, J.)

Miscalculating badly on the 2^nd Amendment, Heller is responsible for not one “tragic act of mayhem,” but relentless mayhem nationwide. Each day, through mass shootings and less publicized but even more widespread carnage, countless Americans, families, and communities pay the price.

“This is serious business. We do not wish to be even minutely responsible for some unspeakably tragic act of mayhem because we miscalculated as to 2^nd Amendment rights.” (4th Cir. 2011, Wilkinson, J.)

Heller’s related right, of “citizens’ militia as a safeguard against tyranny” if “constitutional order broke down” has inspired surges in private militia, armed resistance, and political violence. Endorsing a pernicious myth, the Court has normalized menacing public displays of military-grade weapons.

That was plain wrong. “Citizens’ militia” is an oxymoron that conflates “citizen soldiers” with “militia.” The States were meant to provide that constitutional safeguard, as Alexander Hamilton and Madison both explained. Worse, it‘s “productive of anarchy” as Blackstone warned, if each citizen can decide when order breaks down. The Court’s reckless rhetoric has bred political violence and militia plots to kidnap or assassinate political leaders, including a governor, vice president, even a Supreme Court justice.

Heller has led to a doubling of pseudo militia, including the Three Percenters (2008), Oath Keepers (2009), Boogaloo Boys (2012), and Proud Boys (2016). Anarchy has resulted, sometime deadly, in Charlottesville, Lansing, and the U.S. Capitol on January 6 (Stewart Rhodes declaring the 2020 election “unconstitutional” with calls to “rise up in insurrection” and for “bloody civil war”; another insurgent claiming his “constitutionalist” right).

Heller cannot legally stand

Justice Stevens urged “overruling Heller is desperately needed,” but seeing no way to persuade this Court, advocated repeal instead. That is not only highly improbable, but fundamentally wrong as ignoring constitutional bedrock: the 2^nd Amendment serves as an essential state check on federal tyranny. It is also unnecessary: overturning Heller is all but inevitable.

• Heller’s failure to decide the full text means, as is well established, it can have no binding effect
• Reconsideration is also warranted where Heller failed to address existing law — the state right
• Heller’s rewrite of 2^nd Amendment terms — untenable on their face — reduced it to impermissible nonsense
• Heller’s superficial reading of the people as persons ignored context, founding concepts, and usage
• The Court undermined Heller in 2018, holding patent infringement involves a “public right”
• Heller itself recognized that a personal right “fits poorly” with well regulated militia unless rewritten as disciplined citizens’ militia — or nonsense
• Both individual rights argued in Heller were undebated at founding, without real support, and absurd, leaving the one actually debated: a state right

Almost all these plain errors and oversights have been missed, indicating Heller, the amendment, and founding are not closely read by lawyers, scholars, or courts. The start of a long list, they reveal Heller as a house of cards, waiting to be challenged and fall.

The 2^nd Amendment protects a state right, and is no bar to gun reform

As long understood but never proven, the 2^nd Amendment protects state militia. It has nothing to do with a personal right to guns that turns everyday angry impulses, that normally end in words, into today’s gun violence.

AEP explains what should be self-evident but has been missed about the amendment’s origins and meaning.

Under the first constitution, the States had an express right to keep and arm their militia. The amendment was drafted out of fears the new Constitution — that shifted to Congress the power to arm militia — left the States’ right to arm implied and subject to federal tyranny. They demanded it be made express, which is all that was debated.

How the amendment gave States what they demanded has mystified scholars and courts, who assumed away text, the first constitution, militia system, and key parts of the founding record.

Its real origins, object, and full text all prove the state right. AEP breaks down the precise use of language to reveal its meaning, including why the people means the States, and infringed protects a public right.

“Context is everything,” as Justice Scalia once said. Yet in Heller, both sides superficially assumed the amendment refers to persons, leading to undebated meanings. They missed the context and deeper meaning: the people in an amendment about militia for defense of the state — a public right — are the States.

Experts, relying on professional intuition, tend to take shortcuts and make false assumptions. “They are much too quick to jump to conclusions,” however wrongheaded and against their interest, and “much too slow to change.” (Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking, Fast and Slow”)

The 2nd Amendment is mysterious today because we no longer use its terms, inseparable from that era, and scholars and courts assume away what explains them. Suppose it were ratified last year and the only right debated was the States’ right to keep armed militia as a safeguard against federal tyranny. There would be no mystery what it meant.

AEP also shows that the 2^nd Amendment, protecting a state right, is no bar to gun reform.

• “There is no reason why all pistols should not not be barred” (Douglas, J., 1972).

• Once Heller is overruled, Congress and the States will be free to regulate firearms as before, when there were no shooting drills in kindergarten and daily mass shootings.

• With 400-500 million guns, returning to pre-Heller levels can be hastened by common-sense classifications and bans, buybacks, licensing, mandated insurance, and restrictions on sales of ammunition.

Canada has our heritage, happy gun owners, and no epidemic. It classifies firearms as unrestricted (hunting rifles), restricted (handguns, semi-automatics) and banned (automatic weapons).

Australia and New Zealand show buybacks and bans work: “Few Australians would deny their country is safer today” (former PM Howard).

• D.C. v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008) (finding right to own a gun for self-defense, overturning D.C. handgun ban)
• McDonald v. Chicago, 561 U.S. 742 (2010) (extending Heller’s right to the states, overturning a Chicago ban)
• Caetano v. Massachusetts, 577 U.S. 411 (2016) (extending Heller’s protections to stun guns)
• NYSRPA v. NYC, 140 S. Ct. 1525 (2020) (compelling NYC to drop restrictions on transporting licensed guns)
• NYSRPA v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022) (extending Heller to public carry, overturning N.Y.’s good-cause license law)
• Garland v. Cargill, 602 U.S. 406 (2024) (striking down ATF bump-stock ban as exceeding statutory authority)
• U.S. v. Rahimi, 602 U.S. __ (2024) (allowing temporary domestic-violence restraining order to disarm abuser upon court finding of a physical threat; rejecting DOJ “responsible” citizen test)

In the two NYSRPA defeats and in Rahimi, a narrow, fact-specific win as expected, a few GVP advocates finally brought amicus challenges to Heller. But repeating the theoretical right to serve in militia which Heller already (rightfully) rejected as “an absurdity,” they stood no chance.

Mainstream GVP now blames Bruen—which extended Heller to public carry—for going beyond Heller’s statement that the right “is not unlimited,” and putting its presumptive exceptions and most gun restrictions at risk.  But the problem has always been Heller—a catastrophic defeat—that GVP advocates keep miscasting in rosy terms, deceiving us or themselves.

Contrary to public assurances, e.g., by Duke’s Joseph Blocher and SMU’s Eric Ruben that Heller “gives blessing to a potentially wide range of regulation,” The 2^nd Amendment allows more gun control than you think (Vox, 6.14.18), Heller offers only unsupported dicta in a few lines of the 66-page majority opinion. Worse, Heller’s “presumptively lawful” exceptions—public carry of concealed weapons;  possession by felons and the mentally ill; sensitive places like schools and government; commercial sales; weapons of war—relate to 19th and 20th–century regulations, not “founding-era historical precedent” that Heller itself requires. Left for future determination, most are virtually meaningless as demonstrated in Bruen, which struck down New York’s public carry law from 1911.

GVP advocates criticize Bruen as imposing a new test—a founding-era “analogue”—but Heller created it as Justice Breyer’s dissent reflects (“why would the majority require a precise colonial analogue to save a modern regulation?”), along with its “historical tradition” corollary that they also blame on Bruen. They likewise assail Bruen for disallowing “interest-balancing,” but that was “expressly rejected” by Heller (per McDonald).

The Court heard two gun cases this term and accepted a third for review: deciding Rahimi (domestic-violence orders) and Cargill (bump stock ban), and scheduling Garland v. VanDerStok (ATF rule on ghost guns).

Other cases may soon be accepted that imperil other restrictions:

Assault weapon and large magazine bans are poised for review. In Bruen, the Court repeatedly cited then-Judge Kavanaugh’s dissent against D.C.’s assault weapons ban. Absent a serious Heller challenge, the Court will likely adopt his reasoning to extend its “common use” fiction to AR-15s: i.e. since most handguns are semi-automatic and there’s “no meaningful constitutional distinction between semi-automatic handguns and semi-automatic rifles,” AR-15s, as a “popular semi-automatic rifle” are protected. (One distinction: an AR-15 leaves a grapefruit-size wound. Another irony: Heller held weapons of war unprotected under the 2^nd Amendment, turning it—and its state right to arm militia—on its head.)

In July, the Court denied interim review of a preliminary decision upholding Illinois’ ban, in Harrel v. Raoul, over a dissent by Justice Alito, with Justice Thomas writing: “It is difficult to see how” AR-15s “are not ‘Arms’ protected by” Heller given their common use, citing Justices Kavanaugh and Sotomayor, calling the Seventh Circuit’s analysis “nonsensical.” He added: “if the Seventh Circuit ultimately allows Illinois to ban America’s most common civilian rifle, we can—and should—review” the case after judgment. “The Court must not permit” courts to relegate the amendment to “a second-class right.”

Weeks later, the Fourth Circuit upheld Maryland’s ban in a post-judgment case that is now ripe for review, as Thomas indicated. Five judges dissented, citing Heller and Bruen as “controlling precedent.” (At the same time, another district court overturned New Jersey’s ban, likewise citing Heller and Bruen.)

Public carry age limits, given a circuit split, are poised for review and being overturned. In July, Pennsylvania petitioned for review of a Third Circuit decision that struck down its law restricting public carry by 18-20 year-olds as inconsistent with founding-era militia laws requiring enrollment as young as age 15.

Felony possession bans, given another circuit split, are also poised for review despite another Heller exception by dictum. As Justice Breyer warned in Bruen, then-Judge Barrett, dissenting in a Seventh Circuit case, showed “founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons.”

Also at risk are sensitive place bans, despite Heller’s exception by dictum—that Bruen, in more dictum, “assumed settled”—since guns at founding generally were allowed in legislatures, churches, and schools. Even if upheld, such silos offer little protection, for example, to students off campus and others outside government buildings.