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A Biography
Simon & Schuster
May 2014
On Sale: May 20, 2014
272 pages
ISBN: 147674744X
EAN: 9781476747446
Kindle: B00GKKTYAG
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction
By the president of the prestigious Brennan Center for
Justice at NYU School of Law, the life story of the most
controversial, volatile, misunderstood provision of the Bill
of Rights.
At a time of renewed debate over guns in
America, what does the Second Amendment mean? 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 20th 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.
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