Jennifer Tucker - A Right to Bear Arms?: The Contested Role of History in Contemporary Debates on the Second Amendment

Beyond the communities of legal specialists, historians, and activists, many people today may not be aware of the extent to which history itself has become contested ground in the debate about firearms and the interpretation of the Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. Proposed in 1789 and ratified in 1791, the Second Amendment states, A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

This book aims to provide general readers who are not familiar with this subject a glimpse into how and why historical arguments have been marshaled on both sides of todays debate over the Second Amendment. It includes writings by leading historians on firearms and the common law and by lawyers who have served as historical consultants in litigation for both sides. Taken together, these essays offer both general readers and specialists a valuable study of how history itself has become a contested site within the wider national legal debate about firearms. Constitutional historians have debated how intimately the right to arms was tied to service in a well-regulated militia, while social scientists have debated the links between access to firearms and injury or death, whether by homicide, suicide, or accident. This book explores these and other controversies from various perspectives.

The book seeks to fill a lacuna in public historical writing about firearms and the law, a field characterized by strong polarities and in which scholarly exchanges among people with different perspectives on the history of firearms are relatively rare. The subject of firearms possession and use is one of the most divisive issues the country now faces. The history of the use and regulation of firearms is playing an unprecedented role in litigation challenging firearms laws across the country. Firearms are of concern in the United States both for advocates of greater regulation and for those who advocate expanded gun-ownership rights. The availability of firearms is also demonstrably entwined with a broader history of gun violence in the country, with the most recent studies showing that among developed nations, the United States is distinctively deadly, witnessing roughly thirty-two thousand deaths per year in gun-related homicides, suicides, and accidental shootings. On average, around eighty-seven people nationwide die daily from gun injuries (roughly the equivalent of one jumbo jet or two regular airplanes crashing every week). The United States stands out among other nations with respect to daily lethal firearm violence; it has the highest rate of gun-related deaths among industrialized countries, with more than 30,000 fatalities annually. There are signs that people across the political divide are concerned about reducing gun-related mortality (including, for example, the lethality of guns when used against community members, for example, in cases of rage).

Yet to date, however, research on gun violence has been limited because funding for research on the impact of firearms on society is surprisingly scant. In October 2005, a Republican-majority Congress passed a law that largely exempts firearms from federal consumer-safety laws, providing gun manufacturers and dealers with immunity from liability lawsuits. The bill was intended to block lawsuits by individuals and municipalities seeking to hold gun manufacturers and dealers liable for negligence when their weapons were used in crimes. Not only are firearms manufacturers protected from liability, they are also shielded from the production of new evidence about the harmful impacts that firearms impose on society. Since 1996, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been effectively barred from funding research into the causes of firearm-related deaths after Republican representative Jay Dickey led an effort to strip $2.6 million from the CDCs budget that was allotted for gun research the previous year. As the 1996 congressional appropriations bill stipulated, none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention may be used to advocate or promote gun control. Comparable admonitions against generating data from research that might be used to reduce smoking or avoid unhealthy diets are nowhere to be found. One consequence of this state of affairs for researchers is that studies that could fund ways to improve the safety of firearms, or even to document their instances and effects, are in short supply.