Civil War History

In the aftermath of District of Columbia v. Heller, the 2008 Supreme Court case finding that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to keep a handgun within the home, historians have produced a number of books, peer-reviewed articles, and law reviews reinvestigating the origins of the Second Amendment and the broader place of firearms in American history. Patrick J. Charles's Armed in America joins this recent trend by providing an intellectual history of gun rights in the American imagination from the colonial period to today. In detailing the changing history of how Americans thought about firearms, and their role in society, Charles makes several important contributions to this ongoing discussion. First, Charles gives historians and legal scholars a broad understanding of how thinking about firearms changed over time in American society. In this, he agrees with most other historians of the Second Amendment, who understand it as protecting a right that was associated with militia service and not "armed preparatory carriage" or the "castle doctrine." Second, and most notably for the significance of his book, Charles makes an important historiographical intervention by locating the emergence of modern gun rights theory in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Historians of gun rights and gun regulation have argued that the individual rights theory of the Second Amendment was a recent invention, which largely dated to the 1960s and then, oddly enough, was most forcefully articulated in the public sphere by members of the Black Power movement. According to this account, the National Rifle Association (NRA) was a group that for most of its history was primarily interested promoting gun safety and target shooting. It was only Harlan Carter's 1977 "Cleveland Revolt" that turned the organization into a political advocacy group. With this new emphasis, the group was in favor of "law abiding citizens" carrying arms (concealed or otherwise) for their own protection. By the 1980s, a number of prominent law school professors agreed that the Second Amendment protected an individual's right to use arms for self-defense. Thus, from a confluence of interest group organization and legal academic reasoning, our current "golden age" of gun rights was born.

Not exactly, Charles conclusively demonstrates. The actual emergence of gun rights tied to self-defense was located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Early on, the NRA, and a competing organization, the United States Revolver Association (USRA), organized against Progressive Era legislation designed to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. New York State's Sullivan Act (1911), which requires the issuance of a license to own a handgun, was met with active opposition by the NRA and the USRA. These groups argued, in what would [End Page 309] become a standard rallying cry, that the act's passage would only serve to prevent law-abiding citizens from bearing arms. Once guns were "banned," only criminals would have guns. This rhetorical strategy of firearms organizations was only refined during the 1930s when the Roosevelt administration sought additional firearms regulations. Following the Kennedy and King assassinations of the 1960s, the NRA again mobilized to prevent additional firearms laws. Although unsuccessful in their ultimate goal of preventing passage in the 1930s and 1960s, the group was successful in limiting the effects of these laws.

If intellectual history should show people thinking, and not just thought, then Armed in America is quite uneven. Compare Charles's excellent discussion of Timothy Pickering, and his late-eighteenth-century ideas of what a well-regulated militia ought to be, with the depiction of the emergence of modern gun rights ideology in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. We can clearly see the importance of the militia for republican political systems in Pickering's thinking. What we do not get as good a glimpse into is the thought process behind the early proponents of...