Customer Reviews

For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms

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After a short chapter on the European origins of the right to keep and bear arms, Cramer plunges into a detailed analysis of the legal origins of the Second Amendment, and of the treatment of the right to bear arms in state and federal courts over the following 200 years. One of the particularly important contribution made by Cramer is his detailed analysis of gun control cases in the state courts in the 19th century. Judicial hostility to the right to bear arms, Cramer shows us, is nothing new. Intellectual dishonesty, mistrust of ordinary people, and sometimes outright lying have characterized the approach of much of the judiciary to the right to bear arms since 1820s. Not all state courts have been willing to use illogical legal "reasoning" to undermine the right to arms, but many have. As Cramer explicates, judicial contortions have been especially noticeable in slave-holding states. When legislatures have attempted to degrade (or even destroy entirely) the right to bear arms, too many courts have refused to intervene. Of course Cramer also discusses the many state court decisions from Georgia, Washington, and elsewhere in which courts have struck down laws aimed at gun-owners. Too often, scholars who write about legal topics get trapped in legal arcana, and end up producing a book that can be read only by legal specialists. Cramer, to his great credit, succeeds in making legal cases comprehensible to an ordinary reader, and at the same time treating the legal cases which the subtlety and sophistication that good legal analysis demands. For the Defense of the Themselves and the State is not a breezy read. It is 274 pages of single-spaced, small (but readable) text. This is a serious book. Any lawyer or historian with an interest in the right to arms will find the book fascinating. The book would be an excellent donation to a college library or a law school library. It would also do fine at a public library or a high school library. Review by Dave Kopel, Independence Institute, http://i2i.org

The first review said it all, but wanted to second that one. This book is full of information on gun ownership and the many infrigements that have occured and been ignored.

I found Mr. Cramer's book while preparing a Motion to annul New York's anti-pistol law. It is very valuable both as a catalog of applicable cases, and concise analysis thereof. This book should be on every lawyers' bookshelf, on every Court bench. It is also of great value to the civil rights activist seeking to restore the Right to Arms to its proper position alongside the Freedoms of Speech, Press, and Association.

Clayton Cramer is a computer programmer. He has no expertise in law. And as is typical of gun-nut publications, it preesents only the side its wants believed, and leaves out all law and legal authority that conclusively refutes the gun-nut pseudo-law "argument".

And it's doubtful those who give this good reviews could or would pay as much as this overpriced volume costs, therefore doubtful they read it. But who needs to read a book if one believes it supports one position?