Gun Law History

Abstract

This book accomplishes two important purposes. First, it brings together, for the first time, 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 offers a context-based and systematic way to think about America’s expansive gun law history as it coincided with the evolution of the American nation-state from a small yet sprawling, overwhelmingly agrarian, Atlantic Coast–hugging new nation struggling for legitimacy as it then transformed into a transcontinental, industrial, developed, urbanized giant. Indeed, the development of the American nation-state was inextricably linked to weapons regulations of every imaginable sort. This analysis also demonstrates that the contemporary Supreme Court’s interpretation of America’s gun law history is entirely wrong.