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This chapter focuses on the impact of the Civil War on the Second Amendment. Topics covered include the right to bear arms in the Reconstruction South, the Fourteenth Amendment, the rise and fall of Negro militias, the triumph of states' rights in U.S. v. Cruikshank, and the modern gun control debate.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the focus of the book, which is the provisions and amendments of the Constitution that are generally understood to grant the most important individual rights: the First Amendment, which is said to create the rights of free speech, freedom of assembly, free exercise of religion, and separation of church and state (i.e., no establishment of religion); the Second Amendment, which speaks of a right to keep and bear arms; and the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments, which are said to give rights to due process of law and to the equal protection of the laws. It examines some specific examples of important modern constitutional controversies, which are illuminated by analyzing them in terms of appropriate limits on governmental power, rather than in terms of individual rights.

The Second Amendment to the IMF Articles of Agreement (the Jamaica Agreement) did much more than simply legalize the floating exchange rate system. Of fundamental importance were decisions to accommodate a much greater role for SDRs in the future that were also incorporated in the new Articles. The legacy of the Second Amendment continues to facilitate this greater role today and this accomplishment is another example of a hitherto neglected legacy for SDRs. This is a relatively neglected but fundamentally important development in the history of SDRs.

This chapter focuses on the role of the Second Amendment in America's new constitutional system. Topics discussed include the Whiskey Rebellion, rising political tempers and partisan fervor in the years following the Whiskey Rebellion, the constitutional right of resistance, Tucker's defense of the Second Amendment, and the right to bear arms at the onset of the 19th century.

This concluding chapter discusses what can be gleaned from the history of the Second Amendment. It is argued that the most important consequence of reading the Second Amendment by its original understanding is that it demonstrates that both the modern collective rights and individual rights interpretations of the Second Amendment do great harm to the text, effectively erasing half of its original meaning. The current debate over the Second Amendment ought to serve as a wake-up call to Americans, and both sides in this debate need to back away from extremist rhetoric.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the original meaning of the Second Amendment, tracing its history from the 18th history. It then considers the public debates over the right to bear arms.

This chapter explores the development of a states's rights theory of the militia and the right to bear arms. Topics covered include debates during the Philadelphia convention, the right to bear arms becoming an issue, the Virginia ratification debates, the challenge of popular radicalism, and the Bill of Rights.

This chapter focuses on the change in the nature of American gun culture during the early decades of the next century. Americans began carrying weapons primarily for personal self-defense. The expanding economy of this century also resulted in a staggering array of these personal weapons being made readily available to consumers. America's first gun control movement, judging the right to bear arms, and the Second Amendment in Antebellum constitutional commentaries, the abolitionist theory of the right to bear arms, and the right to bear arms mid-century are discussed.

This chapter presents the rationale behind the existence of the Second Amendment in the American constitution. The Second Amendment aims to ensure that citizens can still serve as a measure of check and balance to the government, as the right to bear arms prepares the body of people to resist a corrupt central government. Congress, in turn, can also check the people; should they form a corrupt insurrection, it can be repulsed by having to maintain and deploy a military force to counter domestic unrest. This way, the constitution empowers both sides, so they can continue to check and balance one another.

This chapter focuses on the Jeffersonian era. The Jeffersonian era not only helped transform the meaning in law of self-defense, but also tested the limits of the revived states' rights theory of the Second Amendment that had helped secure Jefferson the presidency. The Jeffersonian era also produced the first Supreme Court decision in the new nation's history to cite the Second Amendment.

This chapter explains that cultural outgroups, those who fall outside the traditionally restrictive visions of the American people, offer more cautions to modern theorists of the Second Amendment, and fear that the amendment narrowly defines the people. As a result, outgroups support the warning against exclusivist populist theories. However, these groups have also the most to gain from a broadly inclusive populist theory, because in the long run the only solution to violence against outgroups is popular unity on the appropriate use of force. The condition of outgroups gives the most compelling reason not to concede the hope for peoplehood expansively defined, as this will be an essential component in the relevancy of the Second Amendment in the new century.

This chapter argues that there are some Americans who do not believe that the Second Amendment is a revolutionary text and that it does not explicitly recognize the right to resist a corrupt government. Most of these antirevolutionists also believe that neither the government nor the people have the right to arms for resistance. They also argue that the Second Amendment only guaranteed the government to keep their militias well-armed so that they could maintain order. Hence, the amendment only responded to one concern: the states' worry that Congress might use its new powers to disarm the militias.

This chapter explores the history of the Second Amendment of the United States Constitution. In 1776, the American colonies declared independence from the British Empire by claiming the popular right to throw off the shackles of a corrupt government and to create a new one. The chapter argues that an army was needed in order to protect the newly established government from the forces of the British Empire and other external threats, but that raising a standing army posed a threat to the citizens, who feared that it may turn the government into a tyrannical regime. To make things fair, the Framers proposed to give the right to bear arms for all American citizens. These events served as the framework for what is known as the Second Amendment.

This chapter argues that the militia movement's theory of the Second Amendment represents the most extreme rendition of the populist interpretation. The militia movement shares much with the libertarians: they all agree that the Second Amendment gives citizens the right to arms for revolution; both fear corruption in the federal government; both perceive danger in disarmament; and all insist that the people will use their arms to make a revolution. Upon closer inspection, militia leaders and libertarians have one small difference: for the militia, the right to bear arms still belongs to the individuals, but they should join private organizations to prepare themselves for revolution.

This chapter discusses the Twenty-Second Amendment, ratified in 1951, which states that the president of the United States is limited to serving two terms. However, given strong enough incentives and good enough lawyers, people may take things that everybody knows are not legal and find a way to make them legal after all. The right political climate can also transform “everybody knows” to “everybody thought,” and half the country can decide overnight that it now “knows” something quite different. The legal maneuvering described here can help a president serve a third term—perhaps even a fourth and fifth. A president would have to be very popular to try this, but if he or she is, then he or she might be popular enough to succeed.

Expanding beyond the text of the Bible, this chapter explores instead a piece of political scripture, namely the Second Amendment of the US Constitution. Over the last half-decade, the Second Amendment has come to enjoy the status of a kind of scripture-within-scripture. Vaulted to a much more prominent status than it had held in the first 150 years or so of its existence, and having undergone a remarkable shift in what most Americans think it means, the Second Amendment provides an opportunity to examine the linguistic, racial, and gendered modes by which these changes were effected, paying particular attention to the ways in which white children and white women were conscripted into the role of the masculine, frontier-defending US citizen.

This chapter explores a 2008 US Supreme Court case that brings into play two starkly contrasted readings of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution: a textualist or “originalist” reading written for the majority by Justice Antonin Scalia, and a “contextualist” reading written by two of the dissenting justices. The Court’s discovery of a previously unarticulated constitutional right (the right of private citizens to carry guns for self-defense) is firmly rooted in the libertarian principles of the US gun lobby. Yet its judgment in this case is made as though it were entirely free of any such context: the Court endows the text of the Constitution with an absolute authority and envisages its own decision-making processes as taking place within an apparently timeless and transcendental institution. That interpretive institution is, however, neither timeless nor transcendental but rather a field of self-reinforcing authority that enables and contains dissenting views and is composed of quite heterogeneous materials: a multiplicity of legal domains, a network of material and immaterial orderings, disparate forms of discourse, and the pre-judgments and tacit understandings that underpin them.

This chapter examines Justice Antonin Scalia’s highly controversial opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller construing the Second Amendment and holding that the U.S. Constitution establishes an individual right to possess firearms. Scalia held his opinion up as an example of constitutional originalism, and the chapter argues that it was indeed exemplary—but for reasons wholly contrary to those Scalia assumed. Rather than demonstrating the value of originalism, Heller shows that originalism is an inadequate and easily manipulable methodology. The chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion was arbitrary both in the source materials it cited and those it ignored and that it was based not on history but in Scalia’s personal love of guns and hunting. More broadly, the chapter argues that Scalia’s opinion shows that originalism is a rhetoric of constitutional change and that the Court’s decision in the case was the result of the half-century campaign of the National Rifle Association to work through the Republican Party to create an individual right to possess firearms based on the Second Amendment.