| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 90.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Militia and the Right to Arms, or, How the Second Amendment Fell Silent. By H. Richard Uviller and William G. Merkel. (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. xii, 338 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 0-8223-3031-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-8223-3017-2.)
The Second Amendment's "right of the people to keep and bear arms" is surely the most politically contentious provision of the Bill of Rights. Unfortunately, that contentiousness obscures much meaningful discussion and analysis insofar as this right applies, as the amendment says, to "a well regulated militia." H. Richard Uviller and William G. Merkel's welcome entry into this cacophonous debate is articulate, thoughtful, carefully researched, historically sound, and above all sane.	1
At the outset they set aside contemporary gun policy controversies, noting that their purposes instead are to advance three arguments: that any meaningful analysis of the intent of the country's founders yielded a right to bear arms inextricably linked to militias; that the passage of time may rob elements of any constitution of some vitality, a tendency they say applies to the Second Amendment; and that constitutional meaning may be subject to finite reinterpretation, as they "do not believe in amendment by radical reinterpretation" (p. 4), meaning in this instance that the right to bear arms must be assessed in the light of the extent to which militias continue to contribute to "the security of a free state." In the light of these three propositions, the Second Amendment in modern America has become "a vacant, silent relic" (p. 4).	. . .

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