To say the history of gun rights is contentious would be an understatement. It is a history that has become guided by political ideology and cultural attitudes more than by facts.
For more than a decade, I have researched, written, debated, and discussed the history of gun rights, and its legal ramifications. I am not anti-gun, anti-Second Amendment, associated with communism, or some other negative stereotype used by gun-rights advocates to “pigeon hole” anyone who does not wholly subscribe to the tenets of gun-rights theology.
The Second Amendment was not understood in 1791, 1868, 1934, or even as late as 1968 in the way it is today.
As a career historian in the U.S. Air Force, I am not unfamiliar or uncomfortable with firearms. I seek to write history in a manner that adheres to accepted historical methodology and objectivity norms – history that, to borrow from late historian Barbara W. Tuchman, stays “within the evidence.” A historian should never “invent anything, [not] even the weather.”
