To Trust the People with Arms - by Robert J Cottrol & Brannon P Denning (Hardcover)

About the Book

"In 2007, for the first time in nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving the Second Amendment. The resulting decision in 2008, known as District of Columbia v. Heller, was the first time the Court declared a firearms restriction unconstitutional on the basis of the Second Amendment. It was followed two years later by a similar decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago. And in 2022 the Court radicalized its position even further in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen-a decision whose far-reaching implications are still being worked out. The Advantage of Being Armed tells the complex legal history of "the right of the people to keep and bear arms," from the Framers to the curious Miller decision in 1939 to the recent debates over the individualist interpretation of the Second Amendment and its incorporation. Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning approach the story through the lens of the Black tradition of armed self-defense, arguing that gun control has historically been a way of controlling populations deemed dangerous and threatening-including ethnic minorities, immigrants, enslaved laborers, and impoverished populations. The 39th Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution was persuaded by southern efforts to disarm freedmen that they needed to apply the Bill of Rights to the states. While the Supreme Court initially sought to maintain the antebellum social order, Cottrol and Denning show how the legal establishment changed their minds, paving the way for the Court to eventually get it right"--

Book Synopsis

In 2007, for the first time in nearly seventy years, the Supreme Court decided to hear a case involving the Second Amendment. The resulting decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first time the Court declared a firearms restriction to be unconstitutional on the basis of the Second Amendment. It was followed two years later by a similar decision in McDonald v. City of Chicago, and in 2022, the Court further expanded its support for Second Amendment rights in New York State Rifle and Pistol Association v. Bruen--a decision whose far-reaching implications are still being unraveled. To Trust the People with Arms explores the remarkable and complex legal history of how the right to bear arms was widely accepted during the nation's founding, was near extinction in the late twentieth century, and is now experiencing a rebirth in the Supreme Court in the twenty-first century.

Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning link the right to bear arms with other major themes in American history. Prompted by the eighteenth-century belief that arms played a vital role in preserving the liberties of the citizen, the Second Amendment met many challenges in the nation's history. Among the most acute of these were racism, racial violence, and the extension of the right to bear arms to African Americans and other marginalized groups. The development of modern firearms and twentieth-century urbanization also challenged traditional notions concerning the value of an armed population. Cottrol and Denning make a particularly important contribution linking the nation's participation in the wars of the twentieth century and the strengthening of the American gun culture. Most of all, they give us a nuanced and sophisticated legal history, one that engages legal realism, different varieties of originalism, and the role of chance and accident in history. To Trust the People with Arms integrates history, politics, and law in an interdisciplinary way to illustrate the roles that guns and the right to keep and bear arms have played in American history, culture, and law.

Review Quotes

"An excellent introduction to the Second Amendment."--Claremont Review of Books

"Two of the leading Second Amendment scholars in the nation, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning, bring their deep expertise to this rich, detailed history of the right to bear arms. To Trust the People with Arms shows how gun rights took root and developed, from the Revolutionary era to the US Supreme Court's 2008 decision in the Heller case--despite being abused by racists and misunderstood by others."--Adam Winkler, Connell Professor of Law at UCLA and author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America

"Precise, accurate, comprehensive, dispassionate, and cogently argued--this history of the ongoing dispute concerning the right to bear arms and its proper limits is a must-read. If, before ruminating on this account, you think that you know what is right and what is wrong in this debate, the odds are that you are sadly mistaken. Cottrol and Denning have produced an eye-opener written with verve and grace."--Paul A. Rahe, author of Republics Ancient and Modern

"To Trust the People with Arms provides the single most comprehensive treatment of the politics and law of the Second Amendment currently available. Cottrol and Denning's examination of the history and dueling social movements that led up to the US Supreme Court's three most important Second Amendment decisions--Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), and Bruen (2022)--is unparalleled in contemporary scholarship. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom that has arisen since the 1960s about the Second Amendment, the authors' review of the legal arguments and judicial decisions at every level of litigation will set a new gold standard for how to explain constitutional disputes of this caliber."--Anthony A. Peacock, author of Vindicating the Commercial Republic: The Federalist on Union, Enterprise, and War

"This book is exactly what we need right now. It provides a sweeping history from the Founders insistence on the right and need for free people to be armed, through the modern attempts to quash it and its recent vindication in three Supreme Court decisions. It is a scholarly, temperate and reliable guide for judges, lawyers, scholars and students alike, and the clarification so often lost in passionate arguments over the role of firearms in modern America. Bravo to Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning for this valuable contribution to our understanding of the people's right to be armed."--Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right

"Cottrol and Denning provide a framing of the Second Amendment within the long arc of constitutional history that is crucial to understanding the right to keep and bear arms. It is sure to be a classic."--Nicholas J. Johnson, author of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms

"Deeply digging into the history of laws dealing with the possession of weapons, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning provide a fresh analysis that goes beyond the standard debate about the meaning of the right to bear arms. In the process they demonstrate the value of using the lessons of history as a tool for determining how to apply the guarantee of the Second Amendment. Their highly readable and sometimes eye-opening book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned about the vexing problem of how the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms fits into the modern reality of violence in America."--Paul Kens, author of Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age and Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial