New Histories of Gun Rights and Regulation

Résumé du livre

In 2008, the Supreme Court issued a groundbreaking opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller. Relying heavily on historical sources, the Court concluded that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution guarantees a personal right to keep and bear arms for purposes unrelated to a government-run militia. Heller not only marked the judicial culmination of a decades-long historical dispute, but also ushered in a new wave of legal challenges that in turn raised the need for further scholarship on the historical scope of gun rights and regulation in Anglo-American history. In hundreds of cases over the next 15 years, judges relied on both historical research and contemporary evidence in evaluating the constitutionality of gun laws designed to address contemporary problems of the most visceral kind.