Book Description Review Praise for Repeal the Second Amendment: “Lichtman’s damning portrait of the NRA persuades . . . . This call to action will resonate with gun control advocates.” ―Publishers Weekly “A thoroughgoing survey of that most troublesome of constitutional matters. Useful ammunition for an argument on gun rights.”―Kirkus ReviewsPraise for The Embattled Vote:“[An] important book… [Lichtman] uses history to contextualize the fix we’re in today… With luck, this fine history might just help to fan the flame.” ―New York Times Book ReviewPraise for The Case for Impeachment:”It is still striking to see the full argument unfold and realize that you don’t have to be a zealot to imagine some version of it happening…Lies. Abuse of power. Treason. Crimes against humanity. Martial law. Lichtman throws everything Trump’s way.” ―Washington Post“Liberal catnip.” ―Joe Scarborough, Morning Joe Read more About the Author Allan J. Lichtman is Distinguished Professor of History at American University and the author of many acclaimed books on U.S. political history, including White Protestant Nation: The Rise of the American Conservative Movement, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, FDR and the Jews (with Richard Breitman), and The Case for Impeachment. He is regularly sought out by the media for his authoritative views on voting and elections. Read more Customers Review: “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.” How did a once inconsequential, dismissed, and somewhat forgotten, sliver of the United States Constitution become such a hotbed of political strife and the source of overwhelming, mass violence? In Repeal the Second Amendment: The Case for a Safer America, Allan Lichtman, a distinguished professor of history at American University, draws upon a wealth of source material and meticulous historical research to explain how the National Rifle Association (NRA) has hijacked the history of the Second Amendment. In an effort to convince gun control advocates that they must pursue the repeal of the Second Amendment, Lichtman probes the history of firearms and gun regulations from colonial times to the present to detail the ways in which the NRA has manufactured a distorted history of gun ownership in America. Lichtman argues that the “iron triangle” of the gun lobby, the gun industry, and an array of pro-gun (mostly Republican) politicians have used a twisted and misleading history of the Second Amendment to advance their own interests, and enrich their pockets, while entrapping Americans into an endless cycle of gun violence. To solve American’s gun violence problem, Lichtman concludes, the Second Amendment must be repealed.In Lichtman’s view, gun control advocates have been fighting a losing battle because they have fallen too eagerly into a defensive position that attempts to support the Second Amendment as a measure protecting a private right to own guns while also advocating for effective gun control measures. “By playing not to lose,” Lichtman explains, “the gun control movement has been losing. It wins only by becoming as bold and uncompromising as the gun lobby.” As Lichtman contends, it is time for gun control reformers to inspire a different political reality and set the terms for a fresh debate regarding gun violence and responsible gun ownership in America. That debate begins by recapturing the more accurate but, nonetheless, neglected history of the Second Amendment.Lichtman’s brilliantly thorough and precise research in Repeal the Second Amendment shows how the work of historians, and other scholars, can engage a wider stream of audiences and guide public debate towards a more productive pathway for inciting essential change. In 2019 alone there were 419 mass-shooting incidents and almost 40,000 deaths related to gun violence. That madness needs to stop. The lunacy around the historically inaccurate and deceitfully contrived notion of an absolute, ungovernable private right to keep and bear any and all firearms needs to stop. As Lichtman persuasively argues, the insidious gun violence crisis that has plagued the United States can only be attended to once gun control reformers reclaim the Second Amendment’s history and move towards the amendment’s repeal.
His history is wrong because he ignores evidence. For example, there is this brief quote from the book.”“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.” These two brief phrases, knitted together by a comma, form the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, which Congress enacted in 1789 and the states ratified in 1791. “From all the direct and indirect evidence, the Second Amendment appears to apply to a collective, not an individual, right to bear arms,” wrote Jack Basil, the National Rifle Association’s in-house expert on constitutional law, in a 1955 memo to the association’s CEO. Twenty years later the NRA publicly conceded in its 1975 Fact Book that the amendment had “limited practical utility” in combating gun control.8 As even the NRA recognized, the amendment protected only the maintenance of a well-regulated militia, not private gun ownership for self-defense or checking an allegedly oppressive government. For some two hundred years it remained largely irrelevant to enacting and implementing gun control laws. Then, late in the twentieth century, after members voted in a new militant leadership, the NRA erased from memory its own prior findings to reinvent the Second Amendment and distort its meaning to claim a virtually unlimited right to keep and bear private arms.Lichtman, Allan J.. Repeal the Second Amendment (p. 5). St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.This does not comport in any reasonable way with this information”Michigan Supreme Court Justice Thomas Cooley was the leading constitutional commentator of the late 1800s; he wrote a treatise entitled A Treatise on Constitutional Limitations (1868), which he then revised many times over the next three decades, and an abridgment entitled Principles of Constitutional Law (1898)What follows is Cooley’s analysis of the 2nd amendment.”The Constitution. — By the Second Amendment to the Constitution it is declared that “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.”The amendment, like most other provisions in the Constitution, has a history. It was adopted with some modification and enlargement from the English Bill of Rights of 1688, where it stood as a protest against arbitrary action of the overturned dynasty in disarming the people, and as a pledge of the new rulers that this tyrannical action should cease. The right declared was meant to be a strong moral check against the usurpation and arbitrary power of rulers, and as a necessary and efficient means of regaining rights when temporarily overturned by usurpation.The Right is General. — It may be supposed from the phraseology of this provision that the right to keep and bear arms was only guaranteed to the militia; but this would be an interpretation not warranted by the intent. The militia, as has been elsewhere explained, consists of those persons who, under the law, are liable to the performance of military duty, and are officered and enrolled for service when called upon. But the law may make provision for the enrolment of all who are fit to perform military duty, or of a small number only, or it may wholly omit to make any provision at all; and if the right were limited to those enrolled, the purpose of this guaranty might be defeated altogether by the action or neglect to act of the government it was meant to hold in check. The meaning of the provision undoubtedly is, that the people, from whom the militia must be taken, shall have the right to keep and bear arms, and they need no permission or regulation of law for the purpose. But this enables the government to have a well regulated militia; for to bear arms implies something more than the mere keeping; it implies the learning to handle and use them in a way that makes those who keep them ready for their efficient use; in other words, it implies the right to meet for voluntary discipline in arms, observing in doing so the laws of public order.Standing Army. — A further purpose of this amendment is, to preclude any necessity or reasonable excuse for keeping up a standing army. A standing army is condemned by the traditions and sentiments of the people, as being as dangerous to the liberties of the people as the general preparation of the people for the defence of their institutions with arms is preservative of them.What Arms may be kept. — The arms intended by the Constitution are such as are suitable for the general defence of the community against invasion or oppression, and the secret carrying of those suited merely to deadly individual encounters may be prohibited.”As can be seen, it was clearly in the mainstream of legal thought before the events recounted in the quote from the book that the right was not only an individual right but was specifically an individual right to keep and bear military weapons for the purpose of resisting invasion or tyranny.The reason we have to repeal the 2nd amendment is precisely because it established an individual right to keep and bear military grade weapons (that originated in the English Bill of Rights). That right cannot legitimately be infringed by legislation or judicial viewpoints that are historically inaccurate. It requires constitutional amendment. |
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