"This illuminating study traces the transformation of the right to arms from its inception in English and Colonial American law to today's impassioned gun-control debate. As historian and legal scholar Patrick J. Charles shows, what the right to arms means to Americans, as well as what it legally protects, has changed drastically since its first appearance in the 1689 Declaration of Rights. Armed in America explores how and why the right to arms transformed...

"In The Gun Dilemma, Robert J. Spitzer examines this "gun rights 2.0" movement in the light of a host of gun controversies: assault weapons, ammunition magazines, silencers, public gun brandishing and display, and the emergent Second Amendment sanctuary movement. Given the importance of actual gun law history to this debate, Spitzer draws from the historical record to illuminate several contemporary and emergent gun controversies that may well make...

"Just as World War II transformed the United States into a global military and economic superpower, so too did it forge the gun country America is today. After 1945, war-ravaged European nations possessed large surpluses of mass-produced weapons, and American entrepreneurs seized the opportunity to buy used munitions for pennies on the dollar and resell them stateside. A booming consumer market made cheap guns accessible to millions of Americans,...

"The National Rifle Association is unique in American life. Few other civic organizations are as old or as large. None is as controversial. It is largely due to the NRA that the U.S. gun policy differs so extremely--some would say so tragically--from that of every other developed nation. But, as Frank Smyth shows, the NRA has evolved from an organization concerned above all with marksmanship--and which supported most government efforts around gun...

At a time of renewed debate over guns in America, what does the Second Amendment mean? This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers. The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men -- who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the...

"Visiting Martin Luther King, Jr. at the peak of the civil rights movement, the journalist William Worthy almost sat on a loaded pistol. "Just for self-defense," King assured him. One of King's advisors remembered the reverend's home as "an arsenal." Like King, many nonviolent activists embraced their constitutional right to self-protection-yet this crucial dimension of the civil rights struggle has been long ignored. In This Nonviolent Stuff'll Get...

Both the history of the gun control debate, as well as the focus the debate will take in the future, are explored in this unique collection of over 200 documents spanning 200 years. High school and undergraduate students can use this resource - one of the largest collections of key documents concerning the issue of gun control - to explore the seminal arguments for and against further restrictions on guns. Each document is preceded by an explanatory...

"The gun rights issue has been among the most contentious debates since the founding of the United States. This instructive volume offers close but comprehensible readings of the Second Amendment set against the backdrop of fluctuating social and political contexts. Additionally, it documents the evolution of arguments for and against "the right to bear arms." Readers will understand why this provocative issue has continued to rage in the courts and...

"From Colonial times Americans have been conditioned to regard arms-bearing by private citizens as a right rather than as a privilege subject to strict government control. Only in the twentieth century, with the emergence of an urban society, have the old attitudes been challenged and the debate opened over the 'right' to bear arms: first, by the restrictive legislation of the 1930s, and more recently, by the events of the [1960s] which resulted in...

"This book traces the history of debates about citizen-soldiery, militias, and arms control over two thousand years, illustrating for a general readership what eighteenth-century militias were and why the founding fathers believed them to be "necessary to the security of a free state." It focuses on ten events, from antiquity to the Age of Revolutions, in which ideas about citizenship and the comparative benefits of militias versus standing/professional...