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Abstract
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Noah Shusterman, Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment (Charlottesville, VA: Univ. of Virginia Press, 2020). Pp. 288. $39.50 cloth.
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).
Armed Citizens is an intellectual history that focuses on ten moments that Shusterman argues constituted the key turning points on how militias came to be seen as the best insurers of freedom. He begins with ancient Rome, and then moves to Renaissance Italy, early modern France and Britain, and, especially, colonial North America. Specialists will be familiar with his case studies, especially in America: Bacon's Rebellion, Stono Rebellion, the Revolutionary War, and Shays's Rebellion. Nevertheless, his arranging them to explore how each reinforced thinking that militias were the best course of action makes for a compelling intellectual history.
Language: en |