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Presents a history of the Second Amendment to illuminate its controversies, debates, and misapprehensions, explaining its contexts and purposes while revealing how it came to represent gun-ownership rights in the twentieth century.
Reviews with the most likes.
The book is a timely and informative discussion of the origins and meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the US Constitution as well as a survey of the changing attitudes in America (and on the Supreme Court) toward gun ownership.
I wish it contained a road map in addition to the lessons learned, however. Where do we go from here?
An interesting overview of how the Second Amendment was created as an addendum to the U.S. Constitution, and how our perspective of its use and relevance has changed over the centuries. It's a little dry, and assumes you know your American History around the time of the revolution pretty well. (Which ... I mean most of the stuff I remember is because I spent parts of 2017 and 2018 listening to the Hamilton soundtrack on repeat.) I liked the writing of it, and got kind of outraged once the NRA started showing up, but I didn't feel like it swung too far to either the right or left overall. This guy clearly cares about the history and got real irritated (as did I in reading the history) when people started writing court papers to support opinions on 2A that no court had previously ever held.
But! I did get a lot of not-relevant Fun Facts out of it. Like, did you know that the term gerrymandering was named after a guy named Gerry? And that the facial hair that grows by your ears was named after a guy named Burnside? Hee.