The Second Amendment : a biography / Michael Waldman.
2014
KF3941 .W35 2014 (Mapit)
Available at General Collection
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Details
Title
The Second Amendment : a biography / Michael Waldman.
Edition
First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition.
ISBN
9781476747446 hardcover
147674744X hardcover
9781476747453 trade paperback
1476747458 trade paperback
147674744X hardcover
9781476747453 trade paperback
1476747458 trade paperback
Published
New York : Simon & Schuster, 2014.
Language
English
Description
xiv, 255 pages ; 25 cm
Call Number
KF3941 .W35 2014
Dewey Decimal Classification
344.7305/33
Summary
"By the president of the prestigious Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, the life story of the most controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights. At a time of renewed debate over guns in America, what does the Second Amendment mean? This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers. The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men--who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present. As the country spread to the Western frontier, violence spread too. But through it all, gun control was abundant. In the 20th century, with Prohibition and gangsterism, the first federal control laws were passed. In all four separate times the Supreme Court ruled against a constitutional right to own a gun. The present debate picked up in the 1970s--part of a backlash to the liberal 1960s and a resurgence of libertarianism. A newly radicalized NRA entered the campaign to oppose gun control and elevate the status of an obscure constitutional provision. In 2008, in a case that reached the Court after a focused drive by conservative lawyers, the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution protects an individual right to gun ownership. Famous for his theory of "originalism," Justice Antonin Scalia twisted it in this instance to base his argument on contemporary conditions. In The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman shows that our view of the amendment is set, at each stage, not by a pristine constitutional text, but by the push and pull, the rough and tumble of political advocacy and public agitation"-- Provided by publisher.
Bibliography, etc. Note
Includes bibliographical references and index.
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Table of Contents
Patriots' Day
Ratification
The tub to the whale
Arkansas toothpicks, Beecher's bibles, and the Fourteenth Amendment
Revolt at Cincinnati
Contest for the Constitution
The road to Heller
From Heller to Sandy Hook
Flying blind
"The right of the people."
Ratification
The tub to the whale
Arkansas toothpicks, Beecher's bibles, and the Fourteenth Amendment
Revolt at Cincinnati
Contest for the Constitution
The road to Heller
From Heller to Sandy Hook
Flying blind
"The right of the people."