gun control

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/5/2022
  

  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." 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  5/26/2022
  

  Other Countries Figured Out How to Reduce Gun Massacres

  Australia, Britain and Canada took decisive and successful steps to reduce mass shootings since the 1990s. 

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• 5/12/2022
  

  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. 

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• 6/5/2022
  

  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.

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  12/5/2021
  

  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.

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• 11/14/2021
  

  Will SCOTUS Force Us All to Find Out How Polite an Armed Society Will Be?

  by Jim Zirin

  The Supreme Court's oral arguments in a challenge to New York State's gun laws suggest the court is willing to defy precedent and history and assume a power that the Constitution reserves to the people and states, forcing all communities to accept the concealed carrying of firearms.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  11/4/2021
  

  Why are Medieval Weapons at the Center of a Supreme Court Case?

  by Jennifer Tucker

  The history and traditions of English law inform American judicial interpetation today, including efforts to discern the functional meaning of the Second Amendment. A group of historians has briefed the Court that restricting dangerous weapons in public is long-established. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/3/2021
  

  If the Justices Really Value "Originalism," They Can Only Vote One Way in Guns Case

  by Saul Cornell

  "If the justices professing to believe in originalism are sincere about their method, this case offers the rare opportunity to prove that originalism is not always a prescription for results-oriented judging that follows a conservative political agenda."

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• SOURCE: CNN
  8/28/2021
  

  How Racism Permeates the Politics of Guns

  Historians Carol Anderson and Yohuru Williams are featured in a new documentary examining the ways that American gun rights discourse has been filtered through racism. 

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  4/20/2021
  

  Caught in a Plague of Gun Violence (Letters from an American, April 19, 2021)

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  What explains the different reaction to two Valentine's Day massacres, in 1929 and 2018? Heather Cox Richardson examines the connections between a culture of individualism, desegregation, and guns. 

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  3/23/2021
  

  Letters From an American: March 23, 2021

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Beginning in the 1970s, the National Rifle Assocaition evolved into a political lobbying organization increasingly enmeshed with the conservative movement. Two recent mass shootings are a tribute to the organization's success. Congratulations. 

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• SOURCE: Duke Center for Firearms Law
  10/7/2020
  

  Why Heller is Such Bad History

  by Noah Shusterman

  Antonin Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller ignored the actual history of the early American militia in order to invent an individual right to gun ownership.

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• 10/18/2019
  

  Understanding America's History Of Gun Control

  by Samantha Benthien

  As gun violence rates continue to increase, looking to America's history of gun control can provide insight into this polarized issue. 

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  9/12/19
  

  When Texas was the national leader in gun control

  by Brennan Gardner Rivas

  How the land of gunslinger mythology regulated weapons to reduce violence

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• SOURCE: NY Times
  9/7/19
  

  How Congress Passed an Assault Weapons Ban in 1994

  With Congress prepared to again clash over gun safety, in the aftermath of a murderous August, the circuitous route to passage taken by the assault weapons ban 25 years ago illustrates just how perfectly the legislative stars must align for contentious gun measures to become law. 

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• SOURCE: News @ Wesleyan
  8/23/19
  

  ‘A Right to Bear Arms?’ Edited by Jennifer Tucker, Barton C. Hacker, and Margaret Vining Explores History of Gun Debate

  These essays offer both general readers and specialists a valuable study of how history itself has become a contested site within the wider national legal debate about firearms.

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• August 11, 2019
  

  Can the NRA Survive its Current Crisis?

  by Robert J. Spitzer

  The NRA is facing a serious crisis. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  8/6/2019
  

  How the Trail of American White Supremacy Led to El Paso

  We invariably find ourselves locked in conflict with dangerous men intoxicated with their own sense of mission, and drunkenly believing that the only problem with the past is that we ever departed from it at all.

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• 6/9/19
  

  Political Corruption Underwrites America’s Gun-Control Nightmare

  by Thom Hartmann

  The story of the rich politician whose extreme corruption inspired the 17th Amendment--and how the Citizens United ruling allows money to rule politics once again. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  3/9/19
  

  The Black Gun Owner Next Door

  by Tiya Miles

  I’m an African-American historian and, on most issues, decidedly liberal. Could I rethink my anti-gun stance?