Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia considers himself a constitutional originalist.

He also believes the Second Amendment to the Constitution protects the rights of individuals to own guns.

An originalist is someone who views the Constitution as a static document, to be interpreted as the founders originally intended.

I happen to believe Americans have a basic right to own guns, just as they have a basic right to own shoes, coffee pots or any of thousands of products. But I do not think that gun rights reside primarily in the Second Amendment.

And advocates of private gun ownership ought to think twice before embracing Scalia’s decision. It comes with a couple of traps.

First, there’s the originalism argument. Future originalist court decisions might conclude the Second Amendment limits gun rights to those weapons citizens might have owned in 1783. That means guns commonly used today could be outlawed.

Second, in his opinion, Scalia goes to great lengths to find historical evidence of what might be called common law recognition of gun rights. But he doesn’t have much to say about the history behind the Second Amendment itself.

Instead, Scalia fancies himself a grammarian, presenting alternate constructions of the Second Amendment that would make it clearer, at least from his perspective.

This suggests that Scalia is among those who thinks the founders were functional illiterates who couldn’t write an intelligent sentence. This is nonsense.

The problem lies with Scalia and others who insist on reading an 18th century amendment with 21st century eyes. There’s a translation problem. And the problem is this:

The debates we have over gun ownership today are not the same ones that existed at America’s creation.

If you want to understand the Second Amendment, don’t read Scalia. Read what James Madison (the father of the Bill of Rights) had to say in the Federalist Papers. The Second Amendment wasn’t crafted to protect individuals from muggers or home invasions. It was ratified into the Constitution to allow states to defend themselves militarily from the power of the federal government.

The creation of a strong central government under the Constitution was opposed by many Americans at the time. The Bill of Rights was designed to ease these worries and provide assurances that there would be limits to what the central government could do.

Madison plainly viewed the Second Amendment as a check on the power of the central government. The amendment recognizes the ability of states to establish “well-regulated” militias composed of their own citizens in order to defend themselves.

Today’s gun control disputes simply did not exist in Madison’s time, and they weren’t explicitly addressed by the founders.