Gun Law History: How Three-Hundred Years of Weapons Laws Built the Nation

Author/Contributor(s):	Spitzer, Robert J
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Date:	12/01/2026
Binding:	Paperback
Condition:	NEW

Gun Law History achieves two purposes. First, it provides for the first time the largely unknown dizzying array of thousands of old weapons laws spanning over three hundred years, revealing that gun regulation was the default since America's beginnings. Second, it demonstrates how old weapons laws were instrumental to America's political development. This book upends the Supreme Court's history-based analysis for judging the constitutionality of modern gun laws by demonstrating that, contrary to the court's judgment in recent gun law cases, gun and weapons regulations were not only common in U.S. history, but ubiquitous. In fact, the Supreme Court's recent judgments fail its own history-based standard.