Firearms Law Deskbook (2023-2024 Edition)

If you are searching for timely information on firearms cases that are similar to yours, analyzing the disparity of gun control laws in different jurisdictions, or planning trial strategy, then Firearms Law Deskbook should be your first point of reference…

America’s Rifle: The Case for the AR-15 (2022)

This book is the definitive work showing the central place of AR-15s and other semiautomatic rifles in the American story. From the founding to the present, rifles and other firearms have played a pivotal role in American history. The story of America’s rifle is largely the story of American history…

The Right to Bear Arms: A Constitutional Right of the People or a Privilege of the Ruling Class? (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 Founders’ Second Amendment (2019)

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 view emerged that individuals had a “right” to bear arms only in militia service…

Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France: Tyranny and Resistance (2018)

Nazi Germany invaded France in 1940. In every occupied town, Nazi soldiers put up posters that demanded that civilians surrender their firearms within twenty-four hours or else be shot. Despite the consequences, many French citizens refused to comply with the order…

Gun Control in Nazi-Occupied France is also available in translation:

Gun Control in the Third Reich: Disarming the Jews and “Enemies of the State” (2013)

Based on newly-discovered secret documents from German archives, diaries, and newspapers of the time, Gun Control in the Third Reich presents the definitive yet hidden history of how the Nazi regime made use of gun control to disarm and repress its enemies and consolidate power…

Gun Control in the Third Reich is also available in translation:

That Every Man Be Armed: The Evolution of a Constitutional Right (1984, Updated in 2013)

That Every Man Be Armed traces the Second Amendment’s origins from ancient Greece and Rome to 18th-century France and England through the American Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution and adoption of the Bill of Rights…

The Swiss and the Nazis: How the Alpine Republic Survived in the Shadow of the Third Reich (2006)

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. The other voice is that of Nazi Intelligence, those who spied on the Swiss and planned subversion and invasion. Exhaustive documents from the German military archives reveals a chilling rendition of attack plans which would be dissuaded in part by Switzerland’s armed populace and Alpine defenses…

The Swiss and the Nazis is also available in translation:

Securing Civil Rights: Freedmen, the Fourteenth Amendment, and “The Constitutional Right to Bear Arms,” 1866-1876 (1998, 2010)

Whether newly-freed slaves could be trusted to own firearms was in great dispute in 1866, and the ramifications of this issue reverberate in today’s “gun-control” debate. This is the only comprehensive study ever published about the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment and of Reconstruction-era civil rights legislation to protect the right to keep and bear arms. Indeed, this is the most detailed study ever published about the intent of the Fourteenth Amendment…

Target Switerland: Swiss Armed Neutrality in World War II (1998)

In 1943, Adolf Hitler proclaimed that “all the rubbish of small nations existing in Europe must be liquidated,” even if it meant he would later “be attacked as ‘the butcher of the Swiss.’” In his diaries Josef Goebbels described Switzerland as “this stinking little state.” The Gestapo prepared lists of Swiss to be executed once the Nazis overran the country. Yet, as the Nazi tide spread across Europe from the Pyrenees to the Volga, one nation stood free, albeit armed to the teeth—its flag unbowed in a sea of twisted crosses…

Target Switzerland is also available in translation:

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…