Second Amendment

DC v. Heller recognized an individual right to possess a firearm under the Constitution. Here’s why the case was wrongly decided.

On the history of the second amendment, white militias, and border vigilantism.

The persistence of a mythic second amendment in contemporary Constitutional culture.

Imagine a class on gun control activism. Here's what its syllabus might look like.

How a now-forgotten classroom murder inflamed the national gun argument.

Three new books paint a more nuanced portrait of the American militias whose gun rights have been protected since the founding.

The NRA misquotes George Mason to support its own view of "well-regulated militia."

Banning them would gut the concept of an armed citizenry as a final, emergency bulwark against tyranny.

A new history argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans.

A Second Amendment scholar makes the case that gun restrictions are not a recent phenomenon.

The Second Amendment does not stand in the way of better gun laws; the NRA does.

Why the “Founders’ Intent” doesn’t matter.

The idea of an unfettered right to carry weapons in public originates in the antebellum South, and its culture of violence and honor.

The History Guys look at who has had access to guns in the U.S., and what those guns have meant to the people who have owned them.

"I was always working on a theory of America."

The US today has extraordinary levels of gun ownership. But to see this as a venerable tradition is to misread history.

How Kahanism infiltrated the political mainstream.

When we try to recover the “original meaning” of constitutional amendments, we begin with deeply engrained premises about the nature of what we're looking for.

“Gun Country” chronicles the transformation of guns from tangible weapons to ideological ammunition during the Cold War.

A new book about Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing traces the path from Ronald Reagan’s antigovernment ideology to today’s radicalized right.