Second Amendment 
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4/9/2023
Why Did Madison Write the Second Amendment?
by Carl T. Bogus
Understanding the political peril that ensnared both the pre-ratification Constitution and James Madison himself makes it clear that the Second Amendment was written to ensure that southern state militias would be sufficiently armed to suppress slave revolts even if abolitionists controlled Washington.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/14/2023
SCOTUS Decision Means Today's Gun Cases Require Experts on 1790s Weaponry
Legal historians Saul Cornell, Jennifer Tucker and others are in high demand as a legal consultant after the Bruen decision elevated the historical meaning of gun laws to importance in the judicial process.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
12/14/2022
After Bruen: One Nation, Under Guns
by Ryan Busse
"As bad as America’s gun-violence problem is, it could be about to get much worse," says former gun industry insider turned whistleblower. The selective reading of the historical record advanced by Justice Thomas's opinion would force judges to play historian to decide cases, destabilizing gun law in many ways.
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SOURCE: Substack
12/14/2022
It's Time to Be Honest About the Partisan Nature of Gun Culture
by Heather Cox Richardson
"The national free-for-all in which we have 120 guns for every 100 people... is deeply tied to the political ideology of today’s Republican Party. It comes from the rise of Movement Conservatism under Ronald Reagan."
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SOURCE: The Trace
8/5/2022
The NRA's Amicus Brief Machine
Lax disclosure rules about who funds the groups filing amicus briefs means that the NRA has been able to use its wealth to flood the courts with briefs that exaggerate the strength of its radical pro-gun positions, says historian Patrick J. Charles.
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7/31/2022
The Highland Park Horrors Won't Break the Gun Cult's Mythic Hold on America
by Thomas Lecaque and J.L. Tomlin
The myth of the armed citizen has little to do with the American revolution or the vision of the founders. It's all about the right's desire for a revolution to come.
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SOURCE: The Atlantic
7/25/2022
The Gun Industry Created a New Consumer—Now They're Killing Us
by Ryan Busse
Aiming at a clientele of isolated, insecure young men, the gun industry began to advertise the killing power of its products and encouraging buyers to see this power as a key to their masculine patriotic identities.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
6/23/2022
Adam Winkler on Thomas's Historical Cherry-Picking on Gun Rights
Isaac Chotiner interviews law professor and legal historian Adam Winkler on the selective use of history in the New York state gun rights decision.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
6/24/2022
What SCOTUS's Guns Ruling Means for New York
Researchers suggest that the recently overturned New York state law did make residents significantly safer – from gun suicides – when it was passed more than a century ago.
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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
If you are seeing this item in an HNN newsletter, it's happened again.
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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.