Review: Origins and Development of the Second Amendment

Gun Watch ^ | 24 January, 2016 | Dean Weingarten

[marktwain]

If you want to understand how the United States came to have the Second Amendment in the Bill of Rights, David Hardy's book may be the best place to go.

I have read numerous books and articles about the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. Some have been short, others hundreds of pages.  But I had not read David T. Hardy's slim book.

This is surprising, because the book was originally published in 1986! But, I was in Panama in 1986.  The Internet was just starting to form. At that time in its early development, I had an account on the MILNET, one of the early precursors of the Internet, but it was limited to official email. Somehow, I missed Hardy's book.

The work is a masterpiece of concisely explaining the origin of the Second Amendment from a thousand years ago up to the present. It is must reading for any Second Amendment supporter.  It shows the development of the right through English law.  Joyce Lee Malcolm does as well in her works, but she covers the topic in considerably greater detail. Hardy supplies the information in short, easily digested bites. 

I learned things that I knew, but had lost the sources for, such as the Virginia law that required colonists to bring their arms to church; an English court ruling that guns could not be seized on the pretext of hunting regulation, because guns were useful for self-defense, in 1752; that an English historian thought that French peasants were enfeebled because, unlike the English, they were forbidden arms. This, in 1476!

The first edition is still available on Amazon for $36.81, and used copies are available for a few dollars worth of shipping. The Second Amendment Foundation has the hardcover first edition available for $15.00, a very good deal.

The Second Amendment Foundation has had the second edition printed in paperback.  It was handed out at the 2015 Gun Rights Policy Conference. The second edition includes sections on the D.C. v Heller case and on McDonald v. Chicago.   Both cases did not exist when the first edition was written.

The slender volume now has 111 pages, 16 more pages than  the original 95.

If you wish the Second Edition, it is now available on Amazon.com as well.  At only $15, it is well worth the price. If you attend a Gun Rights Policy Conference, you may be able to pick one up for free.

©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.
Link to Gun Watch

[marktwain]

Excellent work by Dave Hardy. Must read for those interested in the history of the Second Amendment.

[Robert A Cook PE]

Add the earlier attempts BY the British to take over the local armories at Williamsburg (just across the street - literally! - from the statehouse where they has been meeting earlier!, and up north outside Boston (Concord was the second British Amory attack to take weapons away from local control up north)!

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

Another good one is...

THE RIGHT TO KEEP AND BEAR ARMS
REPORT OF THE SUBCOMMITTEE ON THE CONSTITUTION
OF THE COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY
UNITED STATES SENATE
NINETY-SEVENTH CONGRESS
SECOND SESSION

February 1982.

Very rare and hard to find now days.

[zeugma]

I would be interested if anyone has made a PDF or epub of that.

[zeugma]

Never mind. Found it. I’m going to see if I can convert it to an epub.

http://www.constitution.org/2ll/2ndschol/87senrpt.pdf

[Vendome]

I went to Williamsburg and they discussed how the Colonists were required to carry arms and even practice formations.

I was then conscripted into a mock formation and march, with wooden rods as props meant to replicate the carrying of arms.

One of the best days evuh!

[zeugma]

Anyone who has a copy of the report of the subcommittee on the constitution on the 2nd amendment mentioned in the above post as a HTML, PDF or ebook of some kind, can you get in contact with me. The version I found in the link I posted above truncated. There are only 27 pages in the PDF, and the whole thing should be around 150 pages or thereabouts. I took what was in it and converted it into come clean HTML that I can feed into some software to create jsut about any type of ebook you'd like, but it's not worth the trouble unless I can locate the whole thing.

The only place I'm finding it on the net is on google books, which is pretty much worthless, because that is all just images that you can't really do anything with.