Winner: Thomas M. Cooley Book Prize In 2007, for the first time in nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving the Second Amendment. The resulting decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first time the Court declared a firearms restriction to be unconstitutional on the basis of the Second Amendment. It was followed two years later by a similar decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago, and in 2022, the Court further expanded its support for Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen-a decision whose far-reaching implications are still being unraveled. To Trust the People with Arms explores the remarkable and complex legal history of how the right to bear arms was widely accepted during the nation's founding, was near extinction in the late twentieth century, and is now experiencing a rebirth in the Supreme Court in the twenty-first century. Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning link the right to bear arms with other major themes in American history. Prompted by the eighteenth-century belief that arms played a vital role in preserving the liberties of the citizen, the Second Amendment met many challenges in the nation's history. Among the most acute of these were racism, racial violence, and the extension of the right to bear arms to African Americans and other marginalized groups. The development of modern firearms and twentieth-century urbanization also challenged traditional notions concerning the value of an armed population. Cottrol and Denning make a particularly important contribution linking the nation's participation in the wars of the twentieth century and the strengthening of American gun culture. Most of all, they give a nuanced and sophisticated legal history that engages legal realism, different varieties of originalism, and the role of chance and accident in history. To Trust the People with Arms integrates history, politics, and law in an interdisciplinary way to illustrate the roles that guns and the right to keep and bear arms have played in American history, culture, and law.
Robert J. Cottrol is Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and professor of history and sociology at George Washington University. He is the author of The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere and coauthor of Brown v. Board of Education: Caste, Culture, and the Constitution. Brannon P. Denning is Starnes Professor of Law at Cumberland School of Law at Samford University. He is the author of The Glannon Guide to Constitutional Law: Powers and Liberties and the coauthor of American Constitutional Law: Powers and Liberties and Guns and the Law: Cases, Problems, and Explanation.
Acknowledgments Introduction 1. Constitutional Predicates 2. "Negro Laborers," "Low-Browed Foreigners," and the "Efficiency of a Well-Regulated Militia" 3. Arms, War, and law in the American Century 4. From Causal Acceptance to Virtual Desuetude 5. Shifting Tides 6. One Case, Many Controversies 7. A Silence Broken 8. McDonald 9. Bruen, An Unanticipated Epilogue Notes Bibliographic Essay Index
"An excellent introduction to the Second Amendment."-Claremont Review of Books "Two of the leading Second Amendment scholars in the nation, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning, bring their deep expertise to this rich, detailed history of the right to bear arms. To Trust the People with Arms shows how gun rights took root and developed, from the Revolutionary era to the US Supreme Court's 2008 decision in the Heller case-despite being abused by racists and misunderstood by others."-Adam Winkler, Connell Professor of Law at UCLA and author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America "Precise, accurate, comprehensive, dispassionate, and cogently argued-this history of the ongoing dispute concerning the right to bear arms and its proper limits is a must-read. If, before ruminating on this account, you think that you know what is right and what is wrong in this debate, the odds are that you are sadly mistaken. Cottrol and Denning have produced an eye-opener written with verve and grace."-Paul A. Rahe, author of Republics Ancient and Modern "To Trust the People with Arms provides the single most comprehensive treatment of the politics and law of the Second Amendment currently available. Cottrol and Denning's examination of the history and dueling social movements that led up to the US Supreme Court's three most important Second Amendment decisions-Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), and Bruen (2022)-is unparalleled in contemporary scholarship. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom that has arisen since the 1960s about the Second Amendment, the authors' review of the legal arguments and judicial decisions at every level of litigation will set a new gold standard for how to explain constitutional disputes of this caliber."-Anthony A. Peacock, author of Vindicating the Commercial Republic: The Federalist on Union, Enterprise, and War "This book is exactly what we need right now. It provides a sweeping history from the Founders insistence on the right and need for free people to be armed, through the modern attempts to quash it and its recent vindication in three Supreme Court decisions. It is a scholarly, temperate and reliable guide for judges, lawyers, scholars and students alike, and the clarification so often lost in passionate arguments over the role of firearms in modern America. Bravo to Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning for this valuable contribution to our understanding of the people's right to be armed."-Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right "Cottrol and Denning provide a framing of the Second Amendment within the long arc of constitutional history that is crucial to understanding the right to keep and bear arms. It is sure to be a classic."-Nicholas J. Johnson, author of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms "Deeply digging into the history of laws dealing with the possession of weapons, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning provide a fresh analysis that goes beyond the standard debate about the meaning of the right to bear arms. In the process they demonstrate the value of using the lessons of history as a tool for determining how to apply the guarantee of the Second Amendment. Their highly readable and sometimes eye-opening book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned about the vexing problem of how the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms fits into the modern reality of violence in America."-Paul Kens, author of Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age and Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial
