They are trying a different approach.

Editorial Reviews

This book is called "The Second" and Anderson claims the second amendment is really about race.

Carol Anderson is the Charles Howard Candler Professor and Chair of African American Studies at Emory University. She is the author of One Person, No Vote, longlisted for the National Book Award and a finalist for the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award; White Rage, a New York Times bestseller and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bourgeois Radicals; and Eyes off the Prize. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow for Constitutional Studies and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She lives in Atlanta, Georgia. --This text refers to the hardcover edition.

Review

“The second amendment, as Carol Anderson deftly establishes here, was written in the blood of enslaved black people. Our stalemated gun rights debates have focused on the idea that the second amendment preserves liberty rather than its historic role in denying it. This book does a great deal to change the parameters of that conversation.” ―Jelani Cobb, New Yorker staff writer, author of THE SUBSTANCE OF HOPE

“In this extraordinarily important book, Dr. Anderson shows that the Second Amendment was designed, and has always been implemented, to enable white Americans to dominate their Black neighbors. In her trademark engaging and unflinching prose, Dr. Anderson traces America's racist history of gun laws from the 1639 Virginia colony's prohibition on Africans carrying guns to the recent police murders of Breonna Taylor and Emantic Bradford, Jr., showing how calls for 'law and order' have concentrated guns in the hands of white people while defining Black gun ownership as a threat to society. Anderson's deft scholarship convincingly places the right to use force at the center of American citizenship, and warns that the Second Amendment, as it is currently exercised, guarantees that Black Americans will never be equal.” ―Heather Cox Richardson, author of HOW THE SOUTH WON THE CIVIL WAR

“Carol Anderson brings her brilliant analytical framing to one of our most pressing issues: the proliferation of guns and the epidemic of American gun violence. She reveals the racial hypocrisy inherent in Second Amendment defenses of gun rights. The Second is a must-read for students of American History.” ―Natasha Trethewey, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, former U.S. Poet Laureate, author of MEMORIAL DRIVE

“Carol Anderson brings her storied sense of the intertwining of past and present, her keen insights into the wiles of racism, and her passionate prose to this extraordinary take on the meaning of the Second Amendment. This is a necessary history of the roots of gun obsession in slavery, racial assumptions, legal and political fictions that may have put America on a 'fatal' spiral we can only hope to prevent. Let's dream that this book echoes across the partisan canyon.” ―David W. Blight, Yale University, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning FREDERICK DOUGLASS: PROPHET OF FREEDOM

“Like Anderson's previous works, this is essential for everyone interested in U.S. history.” ―Library Journal (starred review)

“A powerful consideration of the Second Amendment as a deliberately constructed instrument of White supremacy. . . . An urgent, novel interpretation of a foundational freedom that, the author makes clear, is a freedom only for some.” ―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)