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Saul Cornell, "A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America"

Americans are deeply divided over the Second Amendment. Some passionately assert that the Amendment protects an individual's left to own guns. Others, that it does no more than protect the left of states to maintain militias. Now, in the first and only comprehensive history of this bitter controversy, Saul Cornell proves conclusively that both sides are wrong. Cornell, a leading constitutional historian, shows that the Founders understood the left to bear arms as neither an individual nor a collective left, but as a civic left--an obligation citizens owed to the state to arm themselves so that they could participate in a well regulated militia. He shows how the modern "collective left" view of the Second Amendment, the one federal courts have accepted for over a hundred years, owes more to the Anti-Federalists than the Founders. Likewise, the modern "individual left" view emerged only in the nineteenth century. The modern debate, Cornell reveals, has its roots in the nineteenth century, during America's first and now largely forgotten gun violence crisis, when the earliest gun control laws were passed and the first cases on the left to bear arms came before the courts. Equally important, he describes how the gun control battle took on a new urgency during Reconstruction, when Republicans and Democrats clashed over the meaning of the left to bear arms and its connection to the Fourteenth Amendment. When the Democrats defeated the Republicans, it elevated the "collective rights" theory to preeminence and set the terms for constitutional debate over this issue for the next century. A Well Regulated Militia not only restores the lost meaning of the original Second Amendment, but it provides a clear historical road map that charts how we have arrived at our current impasse over guns. For anyone interested in understanding the great American gun debate, this is a must read.

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What debate?

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the left of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

What part of 'shall not be infringed.' is so hard to understand?

It is an individual left of every American, each a member of the militia, to posses arms to prevent tyranny in Government, period.

As for the "the modern "individual left" view emerged only in the nineteenth century" crap...

By that twisted logic, the First Amendment is not an individual left too.

It can be proven without doubt with reference to 18thC documents and quotes that that 'collective left' pronouncement is more revisionist BS...

- "The said Constitution [shall] be never construed to authorize Congress to infringe the just liberty of the press, or the rights of conscience; or to prevent the people of the United States, who are peaceable citizens, from keeping their own arms." - Samuel Adams of Massachusetts, Massachusetts' U.S. Constitution ratification convention, 1788

- "As civil rulers, not having their duty to the people duly before them, may attempt to tyrannize, and as the military forces which must be occasionally raised to defend our country, might pervert their power to the injury of their fellow citizens, the people are confirmed by the article in their left to keep and bear their private arms." - Tench Cox in "Remarks on the First Part of the Amendments to the Federal Constitution." Under the pseudonym "A Pennsylvanian" in the Philadelphia Federal Gazette, June 18, 1789. at 2 col.1

If there was a time in history where one needed proof of why the Second Amendment exists, it is now...

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