Second Amendment

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  6/5/2022
  

  History Suggests Gun Control Will be an Uphill Fight

  by Joanna Paxton Federico

  The National Rifle Association has succeeded in blocking popular gun control legislation since it overcame strong public support in the 1930s for national handgun registration in FDR's "New Deal for Crime." 

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• 5/12/2022
  

  Why Andrew Jackson Believed in Gun Control

  by Anders Walker

  Andrew Jackson loved guns, but his correspondence with John C. Calhoun from 1818 shows that he believed that the Second Amendment didn't guarantee an individual right to own them and that regulation was key to public safety. 

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• 6/5/2022
  

  There Oughtta Be a Law

  by Jim Zirin

  A veteran prosecutor weighs in on how American law must erase the distinction between "fully automatic" and "semiautomatic" weapons and ban the weapons that are used in massacre after massacre.

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• SOURCE: Salon
  5/29/2022
  

  Gun Violence is Rooted in Citizens United as Much as the Radical View of the Second Amendment

  by Jim Sleeper

  Our inundation with commerial "speech" and the Supreme Court's declaration of such messaging as a First Amendment freedom, contributes to the degradation of America's capacity to conceive of the common good. 

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• 5/26/2022
  

  Historians on the Latest Mass Shooting and the Politics of Guns

  by HNN Staff

  What are historians saying about the mass shooting in [insert latest location here] and the politics of guns? 

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• SOURCE: Truthout
  4/22/2022
  

  Politics as Usual Won't Stop Mass Shootings – A Discussion with Gun Culture Scholar Pat Blanchfield

  Our society has developed and institutionalized a set of public rituals of disbelief and incredulity around mass shootings that direct anger and pain away from organizing and let politicians off the hook. 

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• SOURCE: Vice
  3/24/2022
  

  The Latest Technology Helping Gun Owners Violate Machine Gun Laws

  Nearly a century of legislation aimed at keeping the public from having fully automatic weapons is being subverted by internet trafficking in cheap devices that modify popular Glock pistols to work as mini-machine guns. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  2/23/2022
  

  The Sandy Hook Settlement Could Transform the Marketing of Guns

  by Tracy L. Barnett

  The settlement between Remington and the families of victims does not accept fault, but it does establish the dangerous connection between the marketing of guns as totems of masculinity and the damage done by young men who acquire them with ease. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  12/17/2021
  

  America as a Tactical Gun Culture

  by Chad Kautzer

  "Vigilantism is fueled by an individualist notion of sovereignty more dangerous than any military-grade weaponry. It rejects the freedom of others as equal to one’s own and views any attempt to support such equality as tyranny."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  12/5/2021
  

  Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Underlying Problem of a Violent Society

  by Andrew C. McKevitt

  A long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons.

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  11/16/2021
  

  How Much is the NRA to Blame for the Gun Culture?

  Two new books help to shed light on how the NRA, partisan politicians, and the gun industry "took a political base of hunters and nurtured a new, expanded audience of gun guys," and how they made Americans live in their world. 

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• 11/14/2021
  

  Will SCOTUS Force Us All to Find Out How Polite an Armed Society Will Be?

  by Jim Zirin

  The Supreme Court's oral arguments in a challenge to New York State's gun laws suggest the court is willing to defy precedent and history and assume a power that the Constitution reserves to the people and states, forcing all communities to accept the concealed carrying of firearms.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  11/9/2021
  

  Secret NRA Tapes in Wake of Columbine Show Decision to Attack Critics for "Politicizing" Mass Shootings

  The NRA faced a crossroads after the Columbine shootings in 1999. They chose a scorched-earth posture that has guided their response to every mass shooting incident since, documented in recordings of high-level strategy meetings.

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  10/27/2021
  

  There's Little Doubt: The Second Amendment Threatens the First

  by Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick

  "In short, the visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights."

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  11/3/2021
  

  If the Justices Really Value "Originalism," They Can Only Vote One Way in Guns Case

  by Saul Cornell

  "If the justices professing to believe in originalism are sincere about their method, this case offers the rare opportunity to prove that originalism is not always a prescription for results-oriented judging that follows a conservative political agenda."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/26/2021
  

  Gun Culture is Priming Americans for Authoritarianism

  by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

  American gun culture devalues human life, desensitizes us to the presence of deadly force in our daily lives, and underlines the message that our fellow citizens are dangerous enemies.

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• SOURCE: CNN
  8/28/2021
  

  How Racism Permeates the Politics of Guns

  Historians Carol Anderson and Yohuru Williams are featured in a new documentary examining the ways that American gun rights discourse has been filtered through racism. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/28/2021
  

  Was the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms Designed to Protect Slavery?

  Randall Kennedy reviews Carol Anderson's "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," and charges that Anderson overstates the influence of suppressing slave rebellion on the drafting of the Second Amendment. 

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• SOURCE: Boston Review
  5/7/2021
  

  How the Modern NRA Was Born at the Border

  by Sierra Pettengill and Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

  Sierra Pettengill's new short documentary "The Rifleman" connects racist violence at the US-Mexico border and the politics of influential NRA leader Harlon Carter, who for decades concealed the fact that he was convicted at age 17 of murder for shooting a Mexican youth in Laredo. She discusses that story with historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz.

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  3/23/2021
  

  Letters From an American: March 23, 2021

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Beginning in the 1970s, the National Rifle Assocaition evolved into a political lobbying organization increasingly enmeshed with the conservative movement. Two recent mass shootings are a tribute to the organization's success. Congratulations.