To Trust the People with Arms: The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment
Hardcover – 376 pages
University Press of Kansas
Robert J. Cottrol and Brannon P. Denning
Available at Amazon Oct. 6, 2023
In nine tightly-written and well-researched chapters, Professors Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning tell an interesting story about how the U.S. Supreme Court went from showing little interest in deciding a Second Amendment case to delivering three consecutive pro-individual rights rulings which have shaken gun control zealots, the media and liberal academia to their respective foundations.
There is much history—some of it certain to raise eyebrows if not objections regarding the history of slavery in early 19th Century America—and about advances in firearms development from colonial times to the present.
One passage which caught my attention is how the authors point to the media of the 1920s and 1930s—both news and entertainment—for sensationalizing and essentially profiting from criminal violence:
“The movies, and perhaps more importantly, the newspapers in their reporting of terrifying events like the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the chronicling of the dubious exploits of the Dillingers and Barrows of the nation helped bring about the first major federal efforts in the field of gun control,” the authors observe. “The time was ripe for such an effort. Public fears were heightened by the growth of organized criminal gangs, an increased homicide rate, and the perception that the traditional reliance on state and local law enforcement to fight crime was inadequate in an age when criminals could easily cross state lines in their automobiles and could hatch conspiracies over the telephone. The Roosevelt administration was prodded and encouraged to seek a greater role for Washington in the nation’s crime-fighting efforts by its attorney general, former Connecticut prosecutor Homer Cummings, and by an ambitious young government attorney named John Edgar Hoover. Hoover was about the business of transforming a previously overlooked bureaucratic backwater, the Bureau of Investigation, into what would become the five-star final, banner-headline-grabbing FBI.”
There is also good detail in how the National Firearms Act was crafted, giving the National Rifle Association credit for forcing modification of the original legislative draft to delete a section requiring registration and taxation of handguns, and removing semiautomatic weapons from how certain guns would be regulated, namely machine guns.
The authors also look at the controversial Miller ruling in 1939, the arrival of military surplus firearms following both world wars, and how the gun debate began growing, and heating up, through the final four decades of the 20th Century, with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King,Jr,.
They mention the rise of anti-gunners such as Nelson “Pete” Shields and Sarah Brady. And things really take shape in Chapter 5, when the authors talk about how judges and Supreme Court justices in the 1970s started looking at, and trying to downgrade, the Second Amendment.
“In the 1970s,” the authors recall, “a number of jurists were eagerly following the advice that former Harvard dean Roscoe Pound had given the bench and bar in 1957: Reinterpret the Second Amendment! Erase the idea that it protected a citizen’s right to have arms! That was done by New Jersey Supreme Court justice Nathan Jacobs when he went far beyond existing precedent and the demands of the case before him to use a challenge to his state’s firearms licensing scheme to write an opinion that read an individual right out of the Second Amendment. US Supreme Court justices William O. Douglas and Thurgood Marshall urged the Supreme Court to follow in that vein when they argued for a “watering down” of the Second Amendment. Hostility to the constitutional provision almost certainly influenced the thinking behind the Supreme Court’s refusal to hear Victor Quilici’s challenge to the Morton Grove handgun ban.
“Simply put, a number of jurists had become convinced that a recognition of the Second Amendment as a right of individuals would be a policy disaster, whatever the merits of such a recognition might be from a historical and constitutional point of view…”
This is a book well worth reading to understand where Second Amendment law is today and how the nation arrived at this point. There are sections which will make some people unhappy. Others may declare Cottrol and Denning “got it all wrong.”
But it’s right there with ample footnotes, and written in a style that hold’s the reader’s attention.—Dave Workman
