Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects
an individual's right to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the right of states to maintain militias.
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, shows that the Founders understood the right
to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective right, but as a civic right--an obligation citizens owed
to the state to arm themselves so that they could participate in a well regulated militia. He shows how the modern
"collective right" view of the Second Amendment, the one federal courts have accepted for over a hundred
years, owes more to the Anti-Federalists than the Founders. Likewise, the modern "individual right" view
emerged only in the nineteenth century. The modern debate, Cornell reveals, has its roots in the nineteenth century,
during America's first and now largely forgotten gun violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws were passed
and the first cases on the right to bear arms came before the courts. Equally important, he describes how the gun
control battle took on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning
of the right to bear arms and its connection to the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans,
it elevated the "collective rights" theory to preeminence and set the terms for constitutional debate
over this issue for the next century. A Well Regulated Militia not only restores the lost meaning of the original
Second Amendment,but it provides a clear historical road map that charts how we have arrived at our current impasse
over guns. For anyone interested in understanding the great American gun debate, this is a must read.
Table of Contents
Preface
1. English Tyranny versus American Liberty: Bearing Arms in RevolutionaryAmerica
2. A Well-Regulated Militia: The Origins of the Second Amendment
3. "The True Palladium of Liberty:" Federalists, Jeffersonians, and the SecondAmendment
4. Militias, Mobs, and Murder: Testing the Limits of the Right to Bear Arms
5. Rights, Regulations, Revolution: The Antebellum Debate over Guns
6. Individual or Collective Right: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Origins ofthe Modern Gun DebateConclusion:
A New Paradigm for the Second Amendment
Notes
Index