Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment by Noah Shusterman (review)

Abstract

In the year that Armed Citizens was published, Americans bought 22,800,000 guns, shattering all previous records. The exploding gun culture in the United States takes as its mantra the last phrase of the Second Amendment to the Constitution that “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” Advocates, lobbyists, politicians, and judges who demand total gun freedom ignore the first words of the amendment, that that right is dependent on “a well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state.” Those defenders rest their arguments upon the “original intent” of “the Founders,” but, Noah Shusterman argues in his excellent examination of the long historical roots of the Second Amendment, when they bypass the first words to get to the “keep and bear” bit, they distort the real purposes of that provision. As a result, Shusterman states in his opening sentence, “the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution no longer makes sense” (1). Without this context—the ideological history of militias—it is impossible to understand what the Second Amendment “meant to the generation that created it” (1).