The Right to Bear Arms

On April 19, 1775, embattled farmers stood armed against British regulars on the Concord green. They bore their own firearms — not in the privacy of their homes, but publicly, where the Revolution itself began. That image, Halbrook reminds us, is the plain meaning of the Second Amendment’s promise: “the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.” It is the text, the history, the tradition — and it cannot be written out by courts or elites. The Right to Bear Arms delivers the most thorough historical investigation ever published of this constitutional guarantee.

Halbrook begins with English precedents: the 1328 Statute of Northampton, the 1686 Rex v. Knight case, and the 1689 Declaration of Rights. He shows how early restrictions were narrowly applied, and how the Glorious Revolution confirmed a Protestant right to have arms for defense. Colonists carried that inheritance to America, where bearing arms was necessity and sometimes legal duty. Trials from the Boston Massacre to the Revolution itself reveal a people accustomed to going armed in public, and determined to defend that liberty.

The book then charts the right through the Founding era, the Bill of Rights debates, and the Fourteenth Amendment. It highlights how Reconstruction sought to secure the freedmen’s right to bear arms against hostile state governments. Halbrook unpacks the distortions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — from the “Wild West” caricatures to Jim Crow laws and anti-immigrant restrictions that denied the right to despised classes. He shows how, in the twentieth century, state courts and eventually the U.S. Supreme Court grappled with a right that had never ceased to exist in practice, even as licensing regimes grew increasingly hostile.

Today, as some states treat the bearing of arms as a crime unless the government grants permission, Halbrook confronts the selective history used to justify such regimes. He demonstrates that the overwhelming majority of states recognize a general right to carry, and that the Supreme Court’s originalist turn has vindicated the right against modern “balancing tests” designed to erase it. The book closes by reminding readers that the Second Amendment was never about privileges for a few, but about a liberty belonging to the people.

This volume, with a Foreword by Renee Lettow Lerner, arrives at a critical time in constitutional debate. It is indispensable for readers who demand evidence, not rhetoric, on what the right to bear arms has always meant — and why it matters now more than ever. (2021ed, 348pp, hb)