Today, gun control is one of the most polarizing topics in American politics. However, before the 1960s, positions on firearms rights did not necessarily map onto partisan affiliation. What explains this drastic shift?
Patrick J. Charles charts the rise of gun rights activism from the early twentieth century through the 1980 presidential election, pinpointing the role of the 1968 Gun Control Act. Gun rights advocates had lobbied legislators for decades, but they had cast firearms control as a local issue. After the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963 spurred congressional proposals to regulate firearms, gun rights advocates found common cause with states' rights proponents opposed to civil rights legislation. Politicians including Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan recognized the potential of gun control as a wedge issue, and gun rights became increasingly tied to the Republican Party.
Charles offers new insight into the evolution of the gun rights movement and how politicians responded to anti-gun control hardliners. He examines in detail how the National Rifle Association reinvented itself as well as how other advocacy groups challenged the NRA's political monopoly. Offering a deep dive into the politicization of gun rights, Vote Gun reveals the origins of the acrimonious divisions that persist to this day.
This illuminating study traces the transformation of the right to arms from its inception in English and colonial American law to today's impassioned gun-control debate. As historian and legal scholar Patrick J. Charles shows, what the right to arms means to Americans, as well as what it legally protects, has changed drastically since its first appearance in the 1689 Declaration of Rights.
Armed in America explores how and why the right to arms transformed at different points in history. The right was initially meant to serve as a parliamentary right of resistance, yet by the ratification of the Second Amendment in 1791 the right had become indispensably intertwined with civic republicanism. As the United States progressed into the nineteenth century the right continued to change-this time away from civic republicanism and toward the individual-right understanding that is known today, albeit with the important caveat that the right could be severely restricted by the government's police power.
Throughout the twentieth century this understanding of the right remained the predominant view. But working behind the scenes was the beginnings of the gun-rights movement-a movement that was started in the early twentieth century through the collective efforts of sporting magazine editors and eventually commandeered by the National Rifle Association to become the gun-rights movement known today.
Readers looking to sort through the shrill rhetoric surrounding the current gun debate and arrive at an informed understanding of the legal and historical development of the right to bear arms will find this book to be an invaluable resource.
