People in america are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert the Amendment protects an individual’s right to very own guns. Others, that it does only protect the proper of states to maintain militias. Right now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong.

Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, implies that the Founders understood the right to bear arms as neither a person nor a about A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Roots of Gun Control in America collective right, but like a civic right-an obligation citizens owed towards the condition to arm themselves in order that they could take part in a proper regulated militia. He displays how the contemporary ‘collective right’ view of the Second Amendment, the main one federal courts have recognized for over 100 years, owes even more to the Anti-Federalists compared to the Founders. Furthermore, the modern ‘individual right’ view emerged only in the nineteenth hundred years. The modern controversy, Cornell reveals, provides its root base in the nineteenth century, during America’s initial and now largely forgotten weapon violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws had been passed and the first cases on the right to bear hands came before the courts. Equally important, he represents how the weapon control battle had taken on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning of the proper to bear arms and its link with the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans, it elevated the ‘collective rights’ theory to preeminence and established the conditions for constitutional issue over this problem for the next century.

A Well-Regulated Militia not merely restores the dropped meaning of the initial Second Amendment, but it provides a clear historical road map that graphs how we possess attained our current impasse over guns. For anyone interested in understanding the great American gun controversy, this is a must-listen.