| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Saul Cornell. A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America. New York: Oxford University Press. 2006. Pp. xvi, 270. $30.00.
In May 1954, Chief Justice Earl Warren announced the Supreme Court's unanimous decision in Brown v. Board of Education, following extensive argument the previous autumn respecting the original meaning of the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Warren explained that the discussion had "cast some light" but that this illumination, such as it was, was "not enough to resolve the problem with which we are faced." Original meaning was neither ascertainable nor dispositive, Warren explained, not for the last time during his career. He then decided the most significant constitutional question of the twentieth century on grounds of justice and public policy, touching off a firestorm of critique focused on activism, subjective values, and legislating from the bench that continues unabated. Ultimately, the reaction against Brown ripened into the "originalism" of Justices William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas, holding out original understanding as a supposed recipe for judicial neutrality, premised on historically ascertainable objective meaning.	1
For some enthusiasts and detractors, the meaning of the Second Amendment right to arms (perhaps as reconfigured by the Fourteenth Amendment during Reconstruction) presents a similarly pressing question of constitutional interpretation, a question whose resolution (like that of Equal Protection before it) has been too long deferred. And as the debate over the Second Amendment and gun control has heated up in recent decades, partisans of all stripes have invoked originalism—now the dominant constitutional philosophy—to legitimize their answers to questions focused on the permissibility of gun regulation or prohibition. Much writing by advocates and by pedigreed academics has probed the original meaning of the Second Amendment, with monographs of relatively fresh vintage exploring the problem from the standpoint of cultural theory and constitutional values (David C. Williams, The Mythic Meanings of the Second Amendment [2003]), constitutional doctrine and theory (H. Richard Uviller and William G. Merkel, The Militia and the Right to Arms, Or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent [2003]), seventeenth-century English roots (Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an Anglo-American Right [1996]), and alleged nineteenth-century transformations (Stephen P. Halbrook, Freedmen, The Fourteenth Amendment, and the Right to Bear Arms, 1866–1876 [1998]). Saul Cornell's new book synthesizes his decade-long research and writing in the field and develops a sophisticated and insightful new perspective that shuns monocausal explanation in favor of nuance and appreciation of complexity. In the process, Cornell has crafted what may well be the most balanced and informed account of the Second Amendment's shifting popular and judicial interpretations over the two plus centuries since its ratification.	2
In other venues, Cornell has not been shy about his views on the politics of gun control, but this is not a teleological or instrumental history. Indeed, only in the short concluding chapter does Cornell address the current political and jurisprudential setting at all. Most of his fast-paced book is narrative rather than argumentative in style, and a reader might well come away with the impression that Cornell wrote not so much for the sake of joining a debate as for the challenge and joy of exploring and explaining his subject. His overarching theme is that there have been during various periods of American history at least four major interpretative spins to the right to arms, each of which has been embraced in different contexts and eras by elite jurists and by populists alike. During the founding period, a civic reading, stressing an individual right conterminous with the duty to serve in the lawfully established militia, appeared self-evident and sensible to Federalists and moderate Anti-Federalists alike, and informed James Madison's drafting of the amendment during the First Congress. Cornell draws heavily on his expertise respecting radical Anti-Federal thought in the 1780s and 1790s to trace the origins of a second strain of gun rights rhetoric, presenting itself as the far more localistic, antistatist, and at times individualistic claim to arms among the Carlisle rioters, Shaysites, and Whiskey rebels.	. . .

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