Customer Reviews

In Search of the Second Amendment

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Documentaries like this one are desperately needed. So many of us Americans are ignorant of the Constitution and even of our own rights. But David Hardy has created a wonderful film to teach us about the Second Amendment.

"In Search of the Second Amendment" is based off thirty years of Hardy's research. He has written extensively about the Second Amendment in law review articles and books. And now he has a DVD about it. But what makes this DVD so great is that he's compressed all this research so that in less than two hours, you can learn a great deal about the right to keep and bear arms.

Hardy has interviewed thirteen professors and several other scholars in his documentary. Each professor is an expert in what they're discussing: Malcolm on the right to arms during the 17th century, Denning on the Miller case, Cottrol on the Fourteenth Amendment, etc. The persons appearing the documentary are more than qualified to discuss their respective areas. So when I refer to Hardy in this review, I really mean the person that Hardy interviewed. It's much easier to write the review this way.

Hardy shows the history of the right in England and then in the American colonies. He continues through the American Revolution, and he discusses how the right was protected in different states, and how it ended up in the federal constitution. Throughout the documentary he cites many primary sources, including from the Founding Fathers and their contemporaries.

He demolishes the collective rights argument. It simply amazes me that anti-gunners to this day claim that the right of the people is not actually a right of the people, but of the state. This is nonsense. He explains the famous Miller case and how the ruling recognized an individual right. He also explains what the militia is and that the National Guard is not the militia.

My favorite part of the documentary is the discussion about the Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Movement. Not too many people know how intertwined the right to arms and the Fourteenth Amendment are. He shows how this amendment was clearly meant to apply the Bill of Rights to the states. The right to arms was an important issue for Congress, and was even explicitly mentioned in the bills they passed. No other right got such attention. One example shows how a Representative wouldn't even consider Mississippi's claims to representation in Congress until they stop violating the Second Amendment rights of blacks. Hardy shows how blacks could not rely on the police to protect them because the police were aligned with the KKK.

The Civil Rights Movement discussion is great. The idea that civil rights workers practiced only nonviolence is a complete myth. Hardy goes over how workers were armed, and Olson, a professor who appears in the film, gives a detailed account of his experience as a civil rights worker. The Klan was willing to kill, but they weren't willing to be killed. When people put up resistance, the Klan stopped attacking them.

The AEI symposium on the right to arms mentions a very important fact: there doesn't exist a single shred of evidence that the Framers or their contemporaries believed the right to arms wasn't an individual right. Anti-gunners have pored over primary sources trying to find a single example but have come up empty handed. Why? It's not because no examples have survived, but because the Founders and their contemporaries believed the right to arms to be an individual right.

Hardy finishes up the documentary with how the right is relevant today. He talks about genocides, criminals, how the police have no legal duty to protect you, and a few statistics.

Some gripes: the audio is somewhat distorted during a few scenes, but this is because it had to be filtered due to noise nearby. Hardy is not some multimillionaire who can reshoot scenes to his heart's content. The film also doesn't have impressive special effects or amazing reenactments. But despite all this, it doesn't really detract from the film. Content is what's most important, not presentation.

Please watch this documentary. But more importantly, please get your family and friends to watch it. Gun owners, like every other group, are largely apathetic. Out of the tens of millions of gun owners (maybe 80 million?) only a tiny minority are a member of a gun rights organization. This documentary can turn a gun owner into a spokesman for the Second Amendment. But the real power of this film will be its appeal to fence sitters. Hardy has created an excellent documentary that will easily make converts out of them.

This documentary, along with Jeff Snyder's book "Nation of Cowards," belongs in the library of everyone who defends the right to keep and bear arms.

This is the first documentary on the Second Amendment and covers the bases with the best available Second Amendment/Constitutional authorities. The presentations are reasoned and scholarly, but very engaging and readily understandable by the lay person. It is a "must have" for anyone seriously interested in the Second Amendment as a civil right. The documentary sets an incredibly high standard for any documentary which follows it; unless Second Amendment law takes some bizarre turns in the next several years,I don't imagine it will have any competitors soon.

This is truly one of the most accurate and complete works done on the subject of the right to keep and bear arms. This DVD is almost two hours long and lays everything out plainly.

The belief that the Second Amendment was intended to give powers to the states instead of protecting a right to own and carry personal arms is thoroughly demolished with complete accuracy.

As an NRA Certified Firearm Instructor and NRA Membership Recruiter and owner of my own popular pro-gun Web site, there was still things on this DVD that I was able to learn. Well done Mr. Hardy. Get this DVD if you want the truth about the Second Amendment.

There is so much hype about the Second Amendment out there. It is hard to know what is real and what is not. Whether you like/agree with the Second Amendment or not, this video is all about the historical facts, and you can make your choice from there. It is refreshing to see the experts talk about the issues (and show the genuine documents from which quotes/facts are taken!) without a lot of hollywood flashiness and spin thrown in. They aren't just "popular celebrity experts or famous political extremists" talking about their opinions as facts. This is a real documentary. The production isn't slick and though the poor production is a bit distracting at times, you can tell that David Hardy takes this work seriously and has put a very sincere effort into the thoroughness and editing of this presentation. Though I am tempted to take one star away for poor production, I won't because there simply isn't anything out there to compare this to, no one else has brought all this information together in such a cogent and well organized way, for that I give it 5 stars. If you have an interest in the history and meaning of the US Constitution, this is a great resource for learning about the Second Amendment.

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I wish this documentary was available years ago when I started investigating the objective meaning and history of the second amendment, it would have been nice to have a source this rich and easy to use, rather than doing it the hard way fumbling around in libraries.

The research is tight, the conclusions are rock solid, and it's a great overview of the field for folks who are either starting out their own search for the second amendment, or those who simply want to get to the essence of the thing in a hurry.

For some folks, especially those who slept through civics or whose teachers loftily dismissed the 2nd amendment as either a defunct relic of our national roots or as a "collective" right, it's going to be an eye opener.

Mr. Hardy has produced a first class documentary. I can't say enough good things about this DVD. It was very educational and does an excellent job detailing the history of one of our most important Constitutional rights. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting a comprehensive understanding of the Second Amendment.