?Two of the leading Second Amendment scholars in the nation, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning, bring their deep expertise to this rich, detailed history of the right to bear arms. To Trust the People with Arms shows how gun rights took root and developed, from the Revolutionary era to the US Supreme Court’s 2008 decision in the Heller case—despite being abused by racists and misunderstood by others.?—Adam Winkler, Connell Professor of Law at UCLA and author of We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights and Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America
?Precise, accurate, comprehensive, dispassionate, and cogently argued—this history of the ongoing dispute concerning the right to bear arms and its proper limits is a must-read. If, before ruminating on this account, you think that you know what is right and what is wrong in this debate, the odds are that you are sadly mistaken. Cottrol and Denning have produced an eye-opener written with verve and grace.?—Paul A. Rahe, author of Republics Ancient and Modern
?To Trust the People with Arms provides the single most comprehensive treatment of the politics and law of the Second Amendment currently available. Cottrol and Denning’s examination of the history and dueling social movements that led up to the US Supreme Court’s three most important Second Amendment decisions—Heller (2008), McDonald (2010), and Bruen (2022)—is unparalleled in contemporary scholarship. Challenging much of the conventional wisdom that has arisen since the 1960s about the Second Amendment, the authors’ review of the legal arguments and judicial decisions at every level of litigation will set a new gold standard for how to explain constitutional disputes of this caliber.?—Anthony A. Peacock, author of Vindicating the Commercial Republic: The Federalist on Union, Enterprise, and War
?This book is exactly what we need right now. It provides a sweeping history from the Founders insistence on the right and need for free people to be armed, through the modern attempts to quash it and its recent vindication in three Supreme Court decisions. It is a scholarly, temperate and reliable guide for judges, lawyers, scholars and students alike, and the clarification so often lost in passionate arguments over the role of firearms in modern America. Bravo to Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning for this valuable contribution to our understanding of the people’s right to be armed.?—Joyce Lee Malcolm, author of To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right
?Cottrol and Denning provide a framing of the Second Amendment within the long arc of constitutional history that is crucial to understanding the right to keep and bear arms. It is sure to be a classic.?—Nicholas J. Johnson, author of Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms
?Deeply digging into the history of laws dealing with the possession of weapons, Robert Cottrol and Brannon Denning provide a fresh analysis that goes beyond the standard debate about the meaning of the right to bear arms. In the process they demonstrate the value of using the lessons of history as a tool for determining how to apply the guarantee of the Second Amendment. Their highly readable and sometimes eye-opening book will be of interest to anyone who is concerned about the vexing problem of how the constitutional guarantee of the right to bear arms fits into the modern reality of violence in America.?—Paul Kens, author of Justice Stephen Field: Shaping Liberty from the Gold Rush to the Gilded Age and Lochner v. New York: Economic Regulation on Trial
