THE SECOND AMENDMENT: HISTORICAL ISSUES
The Right to Bear Arms (2021)
This is the first scholarly study of the history of the right to bear and carry arms outside of the home, a right held dear by Americans before, during, and after the Founding period; it rebuts attempts by anti-gun advocates to rewrite history and “cancel” the Founding generation’s lived experiences bearing firearms. The U.S. Supreme Court has recognized the individual right to keep and bear arms, but courts in states that have extreme gun control restrictions apply tests that often balance the right away. This book demonstrates that the right peaceably to carry firearms is a fundamental right recognized by the text of the Second Amendment and is part of our American history and tradition…
The Founders’ Second Amendment (2008)
Do Americans have a constitutional right to bear arms? Or is this power vested solely in government? Recent years have seen a sea change in scholarship on the Second Amendment. Beginning in the 1960s, a revisionist view emerged that individuals had a “right” to bear arms only in militia service – a limited, collective right. But in the late 1980s a handful of scholars began producing an altogether persuasive analysis that changed thinking on the matter, so that today, even in canonical textbooks, bearing arms is acknowledged as an individual right…
That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984, Updated in 2013)
This book, published by the University of New Mexico Press in 1984 and now republished in an updated version, is the most comprehensive work ever written on the right to keep and bear arms, which is guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution…
Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and “The Constitutional Right to Bear Arms,” 1866-1876 (1998, 2010)
While surrounded by the Axis powers in World War II, Switzerland remained democratic and, unlike most of Europe, never succumbed to the siren songs and threats of the Nazi goliath. This book tells the story with emphasis on two voices rarely heard. One voice is that of scores of Swiss who lived in those dark years, told through oral history. They mobilized to defend the country, labored on the farms, and helped refugees…
A Right to Bear Arms: State and Federal Bills of Rights and Constitutional Guarantees (1989)
The right to keep and bear arms was considered a fundamental, individual right in the original 14 states (the 13 colonies and Vermont) from the pre-Revolutionary period through the ratification of the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1791. A Right to Bear Arms is the first book to document the deprivation of this right as a cause of the American Revolution and to trace the protection accorded to this right by the framers of the first State constitutions, which inspired the Second Amendment…