The Founders’ Second Amendment

Description

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—a limited, “collective” right. But in the late 1980s Dr. Stephen Halbrook and a handful of other scholars began producing an altogether persuasive analysis that changed thinking on the matter, so that today, even in canonical textbooks, bearing arms is acknowledged as an individual right.

Table of Contents

Foreword
Preface
Preface to the 2019 Edition
Introduction

1. “The Inhabitants to be Disarmed”
2. From the Tea Party to the Powder Alarm
3. The Arms Embargo and Search and Seizure at the Neck
4. A Shot Heard ‘Round the World and “a Cruel Act of Perfidy”
5. “Times That Try Men’s Souls”
6. “That the People Have a Right”
7. “A Musket to Defend These Rights”
8. A Constitution with No Bill of Rights?
9. The “Dissent of the Minority”
10. Virginia Tips the Scales
11. “A Majority That Is Irresistible”
12. Mr. Madison’s Amendments
13. The Bill of Rights in the States
14. The Great Militia Debate
15. Old Founders Never Die, They Just Fade Away
16. What Does the Second Amendment say?

Notes
Index
About the Author