Gun Law History

How Three-Hundred Years of Weapons Laws Built the Nation
Erscheinungsjahr 2026
ISBN: 978-0-19-785726-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 248 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 156 mm x 235 mm

Gun Law History accomplishes two important purposes. First, it brings together the full panoply of types of old weapons laws, numbering in the thousands. No work has presented as comprehensive, coherent, and wide-ranging an account of historic American weapons laws from the 1600s through the start of the twentieth century as this one. In the process, it upends many standard assumptions about America's gun history past. That purpose, by itself, is a worthy goal, demonstrating that, contrary to American mythology, the default in American history was weapons regulation, not the reverse.

Second, this analysis is framed in the context of America as a developing nation-state. It explains how America's expansive gun law history coincided with the evolution of the American nation-state from a small yet sprawling, overwhelmingly agrarian, Atlantic-coast hugging new nation struggling for legitimacy into a trans-continental, industrial, developed, urbanized giant. Indeed, the development of the American nation-state was inextricably linked to weapons regulations of every imaginable sort.

Spitzer also demonstrates that the contemporary Supreme Court's interpretation of America's gun law history is entirely wrong. Weapons laws were integral to the overarching purpose of protecting the public peace.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Spitzer, Robert J.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

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Über Autor(innen)

Robert J. Spitzer is Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science Emeritus at SUNY Cortland, and currently Adjunct Professor at the College of William & Mary School of Law. He was also a Visiting Professor at Cornell University for thirty years. He is the author of seventeen books and is Series Editor for the book series “American Constitutionalism” for SUNY Press. He received the SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Scholarship and is the author of nearly 800 articles, papers, and op-eds. He was a member of the New York State Commission on the Bicentennial of the U.S. Constitution.