On Wednesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on the various gun control proposals that have been floated in the wake of the Sandy Hook school shootings. Although they are said to be merely “reasonable regulations” of the Second Amendment’s right to keep and bear arms, most or all of these proposals are irrational and unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court has established a two-tiered protection of liberty. Under the lowest tier, “rational basis review,” it will uphold restrictions on liberty so long as it can imagine any possible reason why Congress might have adopted the measure. By contrast, if a liberty is deemed by the court to be a “fundamental right,” it will subject restrictions of that right to “heightened scrutiny,” meaning that it will skeptically examine the means Congress chose to achieve its ends. This close comparison of means to ends is intended to smoke out justifications that are really pretexts for efforts to improperly stigmatize or restrict the exercise of a fundamental right.