Read more
List of contents
Introduction
Chapter 1: Constitutional Mythology and the Future of Second Amendment Jurisprudence after Heller - Saul Cornell
Chapter 2: The Second Amendment Right to Self-Defence: The Core Freedom in the New Century - Joyce Lee Malcolm
Chapter 3: Annie Get Your Gun: Women, Performance and the Western Heroine - Karen Jones
Chapter 4: "A gun is a gun is anyone’s hand;" Shooting the Gang Girl in Mi Vida Loca - Emma Horrex
Chapter 5: "The Thought of a Black Male with a Weapon Scares America": African Americans, the Second Amendment, and the Racial Politics of Armed Self-Defense in the Civil Rights Era and Beyond - Simon Wendt and Rebecca Rössling
Chapter 6: From Virtuous Armed Citizen to "Cramped Little Risk-Fearing Man": The Meaning of Firearms in an Insecure Era - Kevin Yuill
Chapter 7: Gun Rights and the Rule of Law - Firmin DeBrabander
Chapter 8: To endure for all time or to change with the times? The Supreme Court and the Second Amendment - Emma Long
Chapter 9: Mr. Gingrich's Bequest: Globalising the Second Amendment? - Peter Squires
Chapter 10: The Universal Right of Self-Defense, and the Auxiliary Right to Defensive Arms - David B. Kopel
About the author
Kevin Yuill is Senior Lecturer in American History at the University of Sunderland. His research and teaching interests are broad and interdisciplinary. His concentration is on intellectual history of the United States. He has written on gun control in A Cultural History of Firearms in an Age of Empire (Ashgate Press, pp. 211-230) and in journalistic articles. His monographs include Richard Nixon and the Rise of Affirmative Action: The Pursuit of Racial Equality in an Era of Limits (Rowman and Littlefield, 2006). He has also written on race and foreign policy in the United States at the turn of the century (The spectre of Japan: the influence of foreign relations on race relations theory, 1905–24, Patterns of Prejudice, 2015) and is currently completing a manuscript on the 1924 Immigration Act.
Joe Street is Senior Lecturer in History at Northumbria University, Newcastle. His work focuses on the San Francisco Bay Area in the postwar period and African American radicalism in the 1960s and 1970s. His publications include: Dirty Harry’s America: Clint Eastwood, Harry Callahan, and the Conservative Backlash (University Press of Florida, 2016), The Culture War in the Civil Rights Movement (University Press of Florida, 2007) and various articles on African American radicalism.
Summary
This book situates discussion about gun controls within contemporary debates about culture, philosophy and foreign policy as well as the more familiar terrain of politics and history. Containing a diverse range of balanced perspectives, it asks about the morality of gun controls and of not imposing them.
Additional text
'The Second Amendment and Gun Control: Freedom, Fear and the American Constitution provides a nicely balanced overview of a complex issue in American law and public policy. Yuill and Street have done a superb job of bringing together some of the leading scholars on the differing sides of this multi-layered controversy. The individual chapters are well done. You will agree with some, disagree with others, but in the end you will find that all of them make you think. It will be a must read for both students of the subject and general readers alike.' Robert J. Cottrol, Harold Paul Green Research Professor of Law and Professor of History and Sociology, The George Washington University, USA and author of The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race and Law in the American Heimisphere (University of Georgia Press, 2013)
