44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Funk's Commentary in the Howard Law Journal, January 10, 2000
From T. Markus Funk, "Is the Second Amendment Really Such a Riddle? Tracing the Historical "Origins of an Anglo-American Right" 39 Howard Law Journal 411 (1995):
Few topics of contemporary social, moral, and political debate can provoke as much raw emotion and open hostility as the Second Amendment, particularly in relation to the topic of gun prohibition. This subject routinely causes many well-intentioned people of whatever view to give up all pretense of courtesy and reason in favor of ad hominem attacks on those with whom they disagree. Readers of history professor Joyce Lee Malcolm's To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right will find these ugly by-products of the contemporary conflict refreshingly absent. Malcolm clearly keeps her distance from any broad normative judgments about the social utilities or costs of civilian firearms possession, offering instead a sober, scholarly, historical discussion of the Amendment's origins. Meticulously tracing the British history of regulations on firearms ownership from the Middle Ages on, she provides a detailed and illuminating history that includes the English Bill of Rights and, a century later, the American one. Because it is only in this historical context that the Second Amendment's meaning can be fully understood and appreciated, Malcolm's book is essential reading for anyone interested in this complex and controversial subject.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
very impressive piece of scholarship, July 7, 1999
By A Customer
Professor Malcolm does a very thorough job of showing how the notion of a right to arms contained in the English Bill of Rights of 1689 (and which appeared in a broader form in the U.S. Bill of Rights) was developed during the English Civil War between King and Parliament, contrary to the claims of Parliament who described the right to arms as being one of their "ancient rights and liberties." Others who have examined this provision of the English Bill of Rights have sometimes let themselves be taken in by this high sounding language, but Professor Malcolm has been careful to look beneath the surface.
The last chapter of the book examines how this right ended up in the U.S. Bill of Rights. While necessarily shorter than my detailed study in _For the Defense of Themselves and the State: The Original Intent and Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Keep and Bear Arms_ (Praeger, 1994), it is still a fine telling of the process by which the Second Amendment was adopted.
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36 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Authoritative writing, but minor flaws are irritating, November 16, 1999
By A Customer
Ms. Malcolm nicely lays out the history of the tension between English rulers and subjects over the control of weapons. She made me realize that the current dispute in this country over access to firearms has a long pedigree. Her depiction of the circumstances under which England, in 1689, declared the right to bear arms "true, ancient, and indubitable," when in fact it was none of those is particularly interesting. (See p. 115.) She provides evidence for her view that "it is particularly ironic that some modern American lawyers have misread the English right to have arms as merely a 'collective' right inextricably tied to the need for a militia" (p. 119) when by 1689 the opposite was true. I'm not a historian or a gun enthusiast, but I find all of this quite fascinating.
When the book turns to the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, however, its energy seems to flag. I am sympathetic to the argument that the Second Amendment confers a right on "the people" respectively, i.e. as individuals, "to keep and bear Arms." But Malcolm's argument is undermined, however slightly, when she urges that "[s]ome" i.e., more than one, nascent American state constitutions "included a specific right for an individual to have firearms for his own defence" (p. 150), but quotes and cites, as best I can discern, only the Pennsylvania bill of rights in support (pp. 148, 149). Is there more than one, or not? Another apparent example of waning energy toward the end is the treatment of an argument that "like the Convention Parliament in 1689, the senators [debating drafts of the Second Amendment] rejected a motion to add 'for the common defense' after 'to keep and bear arms.' " (P. 161.) To me, that point seems crucial, but Malcolm does not explore it further, beyond providing a footnoted reference to another source.
Finally, some minor quibbles. Noting the author's regular use of English spelling, I thought she was English until I realized, on reading the penultimate page, that she is an American (p. 176). Perhaps Malcolm was reared and educated in England, but nevertheless her anglicizations are distracting and seem affected. It also seems affected to spell "dissension" archaically as "dissention" (p. 153), and to print "u" as "v" in quoted material, as in "Vs" (Us) (p. 41) or "vpon" (upon) (p. 59). If one is going to do that, why not also ask the typesetter to print quotations with the long "s" that looks similar to the lower-case "f"? (Actually, I wouldn't so much object to that, though it would also come across as affected: at least the long "s" is still an "s," though of archaic form, whereas a "v" is not a "u" at all.) These are, of course, trivial items, but when I encounter them, I think, "Come on, Harvard University Press copy-editors, get with it!"
After all the foregoing griping, it may appear that (1) I am a detail-obsessed curmudgeon of uncommon degree, and (2) I disliked the book. The first point may be true, but the second is not. I look forward to seeing how others eventually build on Malcolm's scholarship.
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