History, 2nd Amendment, Guns

[Saul Cornell]

I am off to the AHA in Boston for a session on the current state of Second
Amendment scholarship, which now seems quite a hot topic in both the
history and law communities. It also seems clear that we are far from a
consensus on  what the Second Amendment meant and how its meaning has evolved.

When my students discussed Emerson at least one person came to the
conclusion that since Emerson had the standard military style side-arm that
one might read Miller to suggest that his weapon was protected. (The view
articulated by several people on the list recently.)

I would  like to challenge several claims made in this discussion. First,
Jack Rakove and Richard Primus have both made intratextual arguments
that  the phrase "the people"   might have both a collective and an
individual meaning.  Ed Morgan's work Inventing the People makes it pretty
clear that this term was the among the most slippery in all of
Anglo-American constitutional theory.

The notion that the collective rights view is a states rights view seems to
have gotten us off the scholarly debate off track. The alternative to the
individual rights view might be framed as follows:  It is a right of  the
people working through the agency of their states to form a militia that is
protected.  There is very little contemporary evidence about discussions of
a right of self defense. (There is ample evidence for  the 19th
century--but that is a different matter.) Most efforts to find such a right
come back to vague claims that Americans were Blackstonian and the right
was a well established English right.  These claims have been challenged by
several of the historians who participated in the forthcoming Chicago-Kent
issue on the Second Amendment.

The debate over the Second Amendment is alive and well and promises to get
even more contentious before we come close to arriving at a
consensus.  Really pretty impressive given the state of the debate before
Sandy helped jump start it!



Saul Cornell
Associate Professor Of History
The Ohio State University
230 West 17th Ave
Columbus, OH 43210

Office Phone: (614) 292-7858
Fax: (614) 292-2282
URL: http://people.history.ohio-state.edu/cornell.14/