Second Amendment

Why Did Madison Write the Second Amendment?

by Carl T. Bogus

Understanding the political peril that ensnared both the pre-ratification Constitution and James Madison himself makes it clear that the Second Amendment was written to ensure that southern state militias would be sufficiently armed to suppress slave revolts even if abolitionists controlled Washington. 

SCOTUS Decision Means Today's Gun Cases Require Experts on 1790s Weaponry

Legal historians Saul Cornell, Jennifer Tucker and others are in high demand as a legal consultant after the Bruen decision elevated the historical meaning of gun laws to importance in the judicial process. 

After Bruen: One Nation, Under Guns

by Ryan Busse

"As bad as America’s gun-violence problem is, it could be about to get much worse," says former gun industry insider turned whistleblower. The selective reading of the historical record advanced by Justice Thomas's opinion would force judges to play historian to decide cases, destabilizing gun law in many ways. 

It's Time to Be Honest About the Partisan Nature of Gun Culture

by Heather Cox Richardson

"The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people... is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan."

The NRA's Amicus Brief Machine

Lax disclosure rules about who funds the groups filing amicus briefs means that the NRA has been able to use its wealth to flood the courts with briefs that exaggerate the strength of its radical pro-gun positions, says historian Patrick J. Charles. 

The Highland Park Horrors Won't Break the Gun Cult's Mythic Hold on America

by Thomas Lecaque and J.L. Tomlin

The myth of the armed citizen has little to do with the American revolution or the vision of the founders. It's all about the right's desire for a revolution to come. 

The Gun Industry Created a New Consumer—Now They're Killing Us

by Ryan Busse

Aiming at a clientele of isolated, insecure young men, the gun industry began to advertise the killing power of its products and encouraging buyers to see this power as a key to their masculine patriotic identities. 

Adam Winkler on Thomas's Historical Cherry-Picking on Gun Rights

Isaac Chotiner interviews law professor and legal historian Adam Winkler on the selective use of history in the New York state gun rights decision. 

What SCOTUS's Guns Ruling Means for New York

Researchers suggest that the recently overturned New York state law did make residents significantly safer – from gun suicides – when it was passed more than a century ago. 

History Suggests Gun Control Will be an Uphill Fight

by Joanna Paxton Federico

The National Rifle Association has succeeded in blocking popular gun control legislation since it overcame strong public support in the 1930s for national handgun registration in FDR's "New Deal for Crime." 

Why Andrew Jackson Believed in Gun Control

by Anders Walker

Andrew Jackson loved guns, but his correspondence with John C. Calhoun from 1818 shows that he believed that the Second Amendment didn't guarantee an individual right to own them and that regulation was key to public safety. 

There Oughtta Be a Law

by Jim Zirin

A veteran prosecutor weighs in on how American law must erase the distinction between "fully automatic" and "semiautomatic" weapons and ban the weapons that are used in massacre after massacre.

Gun Violence is Rooted in Citizens United as Much as the Radical View of the Second Amendment

by Jim Sleeper

Our inundation with commerial "speech" and the Supreme Court's declaration of such messaging as a First Amendment freedom, contributes to the degradation of America's capacity to conceive of the common good. 

Historians on the Latest Mass Shooting and the Politics of Guns

by HNN Staff

If you are seeing this item in an HNN newsletter, it's happened again. 

Politics as Usual Won't Stop Mass Shootings – A Discussion with Gun Culture Scholar Pat Blanchfield

Our society has developed and institutionalized a set of public rituals of disbelief and incredulity around mass shootings that direct anger and pain away from organizing and let politicians off the hook. 

The Latest Technology Helping Gun Owners Violate Machine Gun Laws

Nearly a century of legislation aimed at keeping the public from having fully automatic weapons is being subverted by internet trafficking in cheap devices that modify popular Glock pistols to work as mini-machine guns. 

The Sandy Hook Settlement Could Transform the Marketing of Guns

by Tracy L. Barnett

The settlement between Remington and the families of victims does not accept fault, but it does establish the dangerous connection between the marketing of guns as totems of masculinity and the damage done by young men who acquire them with ease. 

America as a Tactical Gun Culture

by Chad Kautzer

"Vigilantism is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one’s own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny."

Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Underlying Problem of a Violent Society

by Andrew C. McKevitt

A long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons.

How Much is the NRA to Blame for the Gun Culture?

Two new books help to shed light on how the NRA, partisan politicians, and the gun industry "took a political base of hunters and nurtured a new, expanded audience of gun guys," and how they made Americans live in their world.