The Second Amendment

April 7, 2014
Though not likely to end controversial debates, Waldman (My Fellow Americans), president of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, delivers a balanced review of the history of Second Amendment politics and jurisprudence. He goes back to colonial America to distinguish original from changed meanings of gun ownership in the U.S. It’s a story of sudden, violent rupture—continuity for two centuries, then radical transformation when the NRA, with the help of a “remarkable, concerted legal campaign,” got involved in opposing gun control in the 1970s. As Waldman shows, the idea of individual gun ownership “simply did not come up” at the Constitutional Convention, but when Madison and others wrote a muddled Second Amendment, the seeds for later confusion and claims were laid. Guns, of course, abounded, but without constitutional protection. That laissez-faire situation ended when lawyers, ideologues, and special interests, all benefiting from the backlash against cultural change after the 1960s, campaigned to change constitutional law. Its result was the Supreme Court’s notorious 2008 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller, which enunciated new constitutional law—law that even some of the nation’s most conservative jurists condemned. Waldman relates this tale in clear, unvarnished prose and it should now be considered the best narrative of its subject.

April 15, 2014
Given the murkiness of the language of the Second Amendment and worries about armed citizens from the era of the Revolutionary War to the Civil War, from the settling of the western frontier to the gangsterism of the Prohibition era, the U.S. Supreme Court has generally ruled against the constitutional right to own a gun. In 2008 that all changed. Legal scholar Waldman examines the political forces behind that change, including the growing influence of the National Rifle Association and how gun rights play into the culture wars. Waldman offers historical perspective on the fierce debate to decide how much militia the nation should support and then goes on to trace the violent history of gun use in the U.S. and the increasingly contentious debate about crime and safety, all against the backdrop of debates about originalism as applied to the Constitution. This is a lively and engaging exploration of the radically different perspectives of the Founding Fathers, worried about the nation's ability to protect itself yet fearful of a powerful military, and contemporary politicians fretting over culture wars and the role of government and the rights of individuals.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)