The Second Amendment: A Biography

Michael Waldman

May 2014 · Sold by Simon and Schuster

About this ebook

The life story of the most controversial, volatile, and misunderstood provision of the Bill of Rights and “a welcome re-injection of historical context into the present debate over the rightful role of guns in American culture” (Chicago Tribune).

At a time of increasing gun violence in America, Waldman’s book provoked a wide range of discussion. This book looks at history to provide some surprising, illuminating answers.

The Amendment was written to calm public fear that the new national government would crush the state militias made up of all (white) adult men—who were required to own a gun to serve. Waldman recounts the raucous public debate that has surrounded the amendment from its inception to the present. As the country spread to the Western frontier, violence spread too. But through it all, gun control was abundant. In the twentieth century, with Prohibition and gangsterism, the first federal control laws were passed. In all four separate times the Supreme Court ruled against a constitutional right to own a gun.

The present debate picked up in the 1970s—part of a backlash to the liberal 1960s and a resurgence of libertarianism. A newly radicalized NRA entered the campaign to oppose gun control and elevate the status of an obscure constitutional provision. In 2008, in a case that reached the Court after a focused drive by conservative lawyers, the US Supreme Court ruled for the first time that the Constitution protects an individual right to gun ownership. Famous for his theory of “originalism,” Justice Antonin Scalia twisted it in this instance to base his argument on contemporary conditions.

In The Second Amendment: A Biography, Michael Waldman shows that our view of the amendment is set, at each stage, not by a pristine constitutional text, but by the push and pull, the rough and tumble of political advocacy and public agitation.

Ratings and reviews

A thoroughly researched book that explores how the 2nd Amendment came into being and how it has been interpreted throughout history, as well as the most recent ruling by the Supreme Court, that disregards the precedent that was set.Highly informative and contains plenty of reference material.

I had always known enough about US history to have ideas about what the second amendment really means and many of those ideas were validated by this book. What I did not know was the story of how the NRA began or how suddenly it was radicalized back in the 1970's. I also did not realize how silly some of the highest ranking justices in this country actually are or that anyone would seriously claim 'originalism' as a valid filter for reading and applying the Constitution in a world totally unlike (and in many ways better than) the one that existed when the country was founded! That is completely absurd to anyone capable of thinking critically about modern issues. For example, when the founders wrote about 'all men' they were not talking about women or people of color. Obviously, only an idiot would argue that this means women and people of color should not be treated equally in the modern world. At any rate, I highly recommend this book as a sanity check for all people on both sides of the gun debate, although I know the people who need to read it most will not do so.

Watch what happens to Chicago with it's gun bans. Criminals will still have gun. Citizens will be disarmed victims.

About the author

Michael Waldman is president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, a nonpartisan law and policy institute that works to revitalize the nation’s systems of democracy and justice. He was director of speechwriting for President Bill Clinton from 1995 to 1999 and is the author of The Second Amendment: A Biography and The Fight to Vote. Waldman was a member of the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court. A graduate of Columbia College and NYU School of Law, he comments widely in the media on law and policy.