Customer Reviews

Gun Control and the Constitution : The Courts, Congress, and the Second Amendment (Controversies in Constitutional Law)

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The best one-volume source about the legal history of the Second Amendment. This paperback is a distillation of the most important items from Cottrol's three-volume hardback series on the same topic. Included in the paperback version are the two leading Supreme Court cases on the Second Amendment (Presser v. Illinois and United States v. Miller) and one of the most important state court cases (the 19th-century Tennessee decision, Aymette v. State). The full text of the Brady Act and the 1986 Firearms Owners Protection Act are included. But the most useful parts of the book are the reprints of ten major law or history journal articles about the Second Amendment. Topics covered include the English background of the Second Amendment, the original intent of the Second Amendment, and the Second Amendment in the context of citizenship and civic responsibility. Because Cottrol has made the book scrupulously balanced, four of the ten articles represent the gun prohibitionists' viewpoint that the Second Amendment guarantees essentially no right that an individual American could exercise. This anti-rights view represents far less than 40% of the serious scholarship about the Second Amendment, and thus the Cottrol book may create the mistaken impression that the anti-rights scholars are a more significant element of the scholarly community than they really are. The book's careful balance, however, makes it an ideal item for a school library. Cottrol's opening essay is as good an introduction to the meaning of the Second Amendment as you'll find anywhere. Review by Dave Kopel, Independence Institute, http://i2i.org

Professor Cottrol's book is an extremely useful collection of original documents: cases, statutes, law review articles and so on. The scholarship is meticulous, and the presentation is balanced. His lengthy introduction is practically worth the price of the book itself: an extended monograph on constitutional interpretation that rivals many of the law review articles he reproduces in both length and analysis.