Citation

Cornell S. Stanford Law Policy Rev. 2006; 17(3): 571-596.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2006, Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University)

DOI

unavailable

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The debate over gun control is hardly a new development in American history. Although modern opponents of gun regulation have asserted that gun control is a recent phenomenon, inspired by a racist and anti-immigrant agenda, that claim, like so many claims in Second Amendment scholarship, is false. The earliest efforts at gun control were enacted during the Jacksonian era, when Americans grappled with the nation's first gun violence crisis. A number of states passed the first laws intended to reduce gun violence. Then, as now, the enactment of gun control prompted a backlash, which led to an intensified commitment to gun rights. The embarrassing truth about the Second Amendment debate that neither side wishes to admit is that gun rights ideology is the illegitimate and spurned child of gun control.