In September 1993, as the Second Amendment stood on the brink of disaster, our book, Things You Can Do to Protect Your Gun Rights was published. The gun rights movement, having fought a defensive, holding action in Washington since 1988, was under the greatest attack in history. Within a few months , the Brady Bill passed. As we expected, the passage of this " reasonable" law did not lead the anti-gun movement to moderate its demands; to the contrary, the anti-rights movement rolled out an even more ambitious agenda for choking the Second Amendment, and the media plunged into the greatest anti-gun feeding frenzy in American history. As with our first book, we hope that this book proves useful not just to Second Amendment activists, but to anyone who is fighting the good fight for freedom, humankind's oldest and noblest cause.
David B. Kopel is Research Director of the Independence Institute, a public policy research organization in Golden, Colorado, and is an Associate Policy Analyst with the Cato Institute, in Washington.
He is also an Adjunct Professor of Advanced Constitutional Law at Denver University, Sturm College of Law.
Kopel is one of several contributors to The Volokh Conspiracy, a group weblog of several legal academics. From time to time he writes for the Wall Street Journal and other periodicals.
He is the author of 13 books, and 67 scholarly articles published in journals such as the Michigan Law Review, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, SAIS Review, and the Brown Journal on World Affairs. His topics include constitutional law, international law, criminal justice, technology, antitrust, media issues, and environmental policy. He has contributed entries to nine academic encyclopedias, and served on the Board of Editors for one.
His research has been cited by eight state supreme courts, three federal circuit court of appeals decision, and 535 law review articles.
On March 18, 2008, he appeared before the United States Supreme Court as part of the team presenting the oral argument in District of Columbia v. Heller, the Court's first major case on the Second Amendment since 1939. His Heller amicus brief for a law coalition of law enforcement organizations and district attorneys was cited four times in the Court's Heller opinions.
Kopel serves as a peer reviewer for Criminal Justice Policy Review, and for grant proposals for the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Before joining the Independence Institute, he served as an Assistant Attorney General for the State of Colorado, dealing with enforcement of hazardous waste, Superfund, and other environmental laws. In 1998-99, he served as an Adjunct Professor of Law at New York University. He graduated Magna Cum Laude from the University of Michigan Law School, and earned a B.A. in History with Highest Honors from Brown University, where his thesis on Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., was awarded the National Geographic Society Prize.
Websites:
Independence Institute, independenceinstitute.org
Cato Institute: www.cato.org
Kopel: davekopel.org, kopel.tw (Chinese)
