A Right to Bear Arms?

The debate over the Second Amendment has unveiled new and useful information about the history of guns and their possession and meaning in the United States of America. History itself has become contested ground in the debate about firearms and in the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Specifically this collection of essays gives special attention to the important and often overlooked dimension of the applications of history in the law. These essays illustrate the complexity of the firearms debate, the relation between law and behavior, and the role that historical knowledge plays in contemporary debates over law and policy. Wide-ranging and stimulating The Right to Bear Arms is bound to captivate both historians and casual readers alike.
"The history of firearm use and possession is a topic of considerable contemporary debate. Yet, what do we actually know about firearms in the Anglo-American tradition? How is the history of firearms taught and remembered? In recent years historians and legal scholars have examined different threads of the densely interwoven relationships between firearms and American culture and society. This history stretches back to 14th-century England and includes locations as diverse as Puritan Massachusetts and 19th-century Dodge City. Rather than assume a static, unchanging relationship to firearms, historians and legal scholars have shown that this history has been closely related to the broader processes of social change that transformed American society from an early modern pre-industrial culture governed by a powerful monarch to a multi-cultural industrial democracy. The book addresses aspects of the current state of historical scholarship on firearms; offers a rare, bipartisan view of the significant breadth of the current state of historical scholarship on firearms history; and includes views of legal practitioners with divergent interpretations of the current meaning of the Second Amendment."--Provided by publisher.