Decoding the Second Amendment: A Journey Through History and its Impact on the Law Today

In his latest book, Armed Citizens: The Road from Ancient Rome to the Second Amendment​,  Dr. Noah Shusterman posits how the question isn't the existence of the right to bear arms, but rather, about determining the specific individuals or groups entitled to bear arms. With host JJ, Dr. Shusterman details how, during the American Revolution, Americans needed to, and did, depict their conflict as a battle between civilians and trained soldiers.  As such, the framers of the Constitution placed their confidence in citizen soldiers and a "well-regulated militia," a concept that endures in contemporary times (though often erroneously understood).  If you've ever wondered "how can I combine the Roman Empire and conversations about gun violence," this is a podcast episode you won't want to miss.

Further reading:
 A Well Regulated Right: The Early American Origins of Gun Control  (Fordham Law Review)
The Supreme Court Gets a 'Well Regulated Militia' Wrong (Time Magazine)
What Do Guns Mean to Far-Right Extremists? (the Trace)
Citizen Militias in the U.S. Are Moving toward More Violent Extremism (Scientific American)

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:08

This is the legal disclaimer, where I tell you that the views, thoughts and opinion shared on this podcast belong solely to our guests and hosts and not necessarily Brady or Brady's affiliates. Please note this podcast contains discussions of violence that some people may find disturbing. It's okay, we find it disturbing too. Hey, everybody, welcome back to another episode of Red, blue and Brady. I'm one of your hosts, jj, flying solo today, with the exception of my guest, dr Noah Schusterman, who is joining us to talk about his newest book, arm Citizens thrown from ancient Rome to the Second Amendment. Now, if the title doesn't give you enough of a hint, today we are talking about the Second Amendment, and while we've dug in a lot on this podcast about the history of the Second Amendment in terms of how it played out and how it was initially formated, we've largely focused on that idea of a well-regulated part of a well-regulated militia, right, but we haven't dug totally into what maybe the authors of the Second Amendment thought of when they thought of a militia, and so today we're unpacking directly that.

Speaker 2: 1:30

Noah Schusterman, I am a history professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I'm from Philadelphia. I'm from Hong Kong Since I guess it's around 10 years now I've been studying the history of the Second Amendment. Sure and somewhat different background that I've been an 18th century historian for a while now.

Speaker 1: 1:54

Yeah, I wonder can we trace that out just for a minute, because I'm always so curious when folks come on the podcast how you end up going from French Revolution clearly teaching that in the context of being in Hong Kong at university right To being like no American. Second Amendment we got to dig into this. This is what I'm doing.

Speaker 2: 2:11

Well, there's some independent variables there. I never meant to be a historian of just one. I wanted to be a historian. And the way history works is you have to specialize for a lot of reasons professionally, just because there's so much.

Speaker 2: 2:25

Yeah, sure enough to choose, and the stuff I learned about researching as a graduate student really pushed me into this very national approach to history and it was kind of a choose a nation sort of situation.

Speaker 2: 2:39

Things have changed a lot among historians since then. But I'd never planned to spend my whole career on the French Revolution and then I was finishing up my second book in a few projects that went along with that with Zendio Cabot, and so that helped me out but woke a lot of people up. But I also have to say I was at that point looking for a project anyway, so I didn't put down a ton of stuff once Zendio Cabot finished, another walking round, just being very angry, including at myself, for having what did I been doing? It was my research that I was just talking about these other topics that didn't seem to be changing anybody's lives in the present day. And then the whole Bill of Rights is an 18th century document. I'm an 18th century scholar, so I just started looking around for ways that I could make those links, see what sort of new angles I had from my own background.

Speaker 1: 3:39

Well, and with the rise of originalism or appeals, the idea of originalism, I guess I think that's super fitting. And before we dig more into the book, I think we need to maybe start from terms for folks. So could you maybe break down for everyone not just what a militia is, but what is this idea of a citizen militia, a citizen soldier?

Speaker 2: 3:59

Sure, because when militia hits the headlines in ex-Yugoslavia militias I mean, this is more of a 90s thing militias in cheatering African states. It's a very different kind of institution. What I'm talking about in this book is the 18th century, 17th 18th century. Militias 18th century were citizens, white men in the US were required to be part of their local machine. This would be a part-time activity, usually not that frequent, maybe once a month, where they would go train and members of the militia were registered. This was. You didn't declare yourself in the militia, you were required to participate. You had your rank, you had your chain of command. Usually it's some kind of required equipment, although everybody seems to think that those requirements were not particularly well adhered to. But it was an official institution and the main feature of it, the distinguishing feature, is that the men in it were only in it. Parts of. They had careers. Most of them were at farms, but they had careers and they did this part-time, as opposed to professional soldiers in a wartime army or in a peacetime standing army.

Speaker 1: 5:29

And that this was a government-sanctioned institution. This wasn't me claiming my own militia Very much.

Speaker 2: 5:36

Now there are movements, shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, with these. If everybody is required to be in a militia and there's some sort of uprising, then the people involved in that uprising are in the militia. There isn't some group of other people. Now, when we get to the slave south, that's not. Those dynamics change. But so because all the people in say Shays Rebellion were these were men. There wasn't a you know what. I don't know enough about Shays Rebellion to say that women didn't participate. So I'm that was.

Speaker 1: 6:10

Yes, we talk a lot about history, but we are not a history podcast, so don't write in about that, not this week.

Speaker 2: 6:17

But of the ones who make it into the standard accounts. They're all men and because they're all men in the militia they declare themselves the militia. But the Massachusetts governor from the Pennsylvania governor for the Whiskey Rebellion, they felt otherwise. The like the National Guard today that governors are in charge of the National Guard. Governors were in charge of the state militias. Oil governors were in charge of the colonial militias and there is a kind of interesting that the period at the start of the revolution where you start to have there's a oil governor who nobody's listening to and there's sort of a shadow government. The militia is all loyal to the shadow government. Those things happen. But yes, this is very much official. You can't just declare yourself militia and go. You know, you go play with guns in the woods. That wasn't that kind of thing.

Speaker 1: 7:09

Well, and that was just such a different perception of militias than, I think, what people see in the media or what you know folks who are historians or who don't enjoy history you know what they, what they actually interact with, and I think that this whole book is really myth busting from the ground up, and I think it leads into how the founders, how the writers of these documents, you know, what were their conceptions of militias. And so I'm wondering, like even from a historian's perspective, were there things or myths that really struck out to you, Like what was something interesting that came up as you were doing the research for this book?

Speaker 2: 7:40

There were a bunch of things that stood out. One was that there were new things to be said. So now you worry when you go on such a new topic that you're just going to be saying things that other people have already said, and that wasn't the case. It's to talk a little bit generally, like as a researcher in history. I sort of start with what material, what information do I have, what information can I get and is there anything that information is trying to tell and for history? If you can get something that way, you should. If you're trying to cure cancer and the information you have isn't giving you a cancer cure, you have to take more aggressive approaches. But what I was seeing in the sources wasn't really what I was seeing, certainly not in the way people discussed the amendment. You could find scholarly articles that assess this thing, but it just may have.

Speaker 2: 8:31

People were into the militia, people were so into talking about it, people were so into praising it and it's a different group of people that are into praising it than people that are actually reading the American Revolution, say. But there was just this whole world of militia advocates and these whole sort of these theories of the militia. Listeners can't see, I'm trying to put my hands into these kind of rounding or orbital thing, but this system of thought that fits together, where militias can accomplish all these great things and standing armies can accomplish all these horrible things, and it just was very clear to me that this was the story, not just the story that I wanted to tell, but this was at some level the story that the Americans are telling themselves in the late 18th century that winds up eventually certainly in this line that a well-regulated militia is necessary for the security of a free state.

Speaker 1: 9:33

It's so interesting because then obviously in the modern context, we see where those dominoes end up falling in that thought process. So I'm not asking you to maybe try to condense your book and align. Certainly everyone should go read it. There's links in the description of this episode, but you take a kind of bold stance when you open your text with the phrase the Second Amendment no longer makes sense, and so I kind of want to. Can we start even from there? Is it just because this conception of what a militia was and is are so very different?

Speaker 2: 10:03

Listen, I said that the Second Amendment no longer makes sense and if people want to take that as me saying that what we have now with 40, 45,000 gun deaths a year is insane, then they should, because I think it is. That said, my book doesn't talk about that at all. I forget what I put in the very last pages, but it's really a book that ends in 1791. And people ask me about this and one of the things that strikes me as sort of run around answer to your question is so many of the people running around today insisting that their Second Amendment supporter is to their Second Amendment. Absolutists will also insist that only half of the amendment even matters. How are you a Second Amendment supporter if you all need support half of it? You can be something, you can have whatever beliefs you want to have, but how does that wind up being a Second Amendment supporter?

Speaker 2: 11:04

And I just this line, well-regulated militia people. That part's easy enough to sort of get a sense of what it is. Why is that necessary? For the security of a free state? I just think well, maybe this is my own, me projecting my own ignorance onto everybody else, which it wouldn't be the first time, but I couldn't have told you what it meant 10 years ago and I don't think people really get that. I think it's actually a very clever phrase. I shouldn't say it's like that clever phrase. I think it's a very succinct way of summing up some pretty interesting theories.

Speaker 1: 11:47

And so how does this differ, this thinking of militia that's different maybe, from this idea of militia. Now, that's tracked down. So I guess, what is the historical militia versus, maybe, the current conception?

Speaker 2: 11:57

A state should be secure, right for it to fail state. If you're not secure, somebody's going to conquer you. But the Republican understanding was that if you are not the ones ensuring your security, then you're going to be at the mercy of the people who are. If there is a professional army that is providing for your security and the leaders in that army decide that actually they want to take over the whole country, then it turns out you weren't free in the first place.

Speaker 2: 12:32

It's a weird way to think about things now, but this was very much on the minds of all of these militia advocates. And when I say that the Second Amendment no longer makes sense to me, it's that that whole understanding is gone, not even in the sense that I mean this is a too big an example. But we no longer approve slavery, we no longer have slavery. But if you tell us what slavery is, we know with it. We have enough of the historical knowledge of what that was. All this militia stuff, the standing armies stuff. It's just so gone that it and as a result we have pro police, pro army, second amendment groups and it's just as an 18th century scholar you see that and it just your hint, explodes. There's such cognitive let's it turn, cognitive disillusion.

Speaker 1: 13:22

Yeah, that there's just all of those kind of threads that don't quite connect. You tap dancing around them for the justification of it. Well, and I actually think that that's that you. So you kind of trace it out through the book with there's 10 kind of historical moments or kind of areas that you touch on getting up to, as you said, I think it's 1791, like the end of your text. But the fact that it starts and I've never said this on this podcast we're going to start in.

Speaker 1: 13:48

Rome right, like going all the way back out of that. Because obviously, when we think about even who is drafting right the bill, the bill of rights, who was engaged in that, like the founding fathers, all had this classically backed education where they would have been aware of all of these historical moments and, for many of them, had a really big fascination with the Greeks and Romans. So I think it kind of starting there is brilliant to drag out and I wonder how you won it, why your, how your selection panned out for that, and then why is it important to kind of start there to get us all the way down?

Speaker 2: 14:21

I think the story of Julius Caesar explains a lot. There's a few things where I think that if you mean understand what these were to the men of the 18th century, that you've come a long way to understanding what this hit the men that was. Maybe it's a little self-approgrammed and it made me to put it that way, but that's my take. I think that reading one of the 1690s authors helps a lot, and I get that that's a little obscure. I met authors from 1698, but Julius Caesar was why they put that chapter. I know I talk about other things there as well, but first I should say the man. They wanted to form a republic. The republic that was the United States of America. It still is, and Rome was the republic. I mean the race publicized Latin. This is where the idea comes from, and not that they felt some need to mimic Rome, but if you didn't want to be like Rome in some way, you didn't call it a republic. And so there's that. And there was an understanding of what Rome had been and what would be key, and Rome had grown to greatness as a republic, and a republic where all of the citizens who created, afford to equip themselves, were soldiers. This is the first militia I'll mess it up if I try to give the Latin term, but these Latin I think it's M-I-L-I-C-E, but of course it's announced, so it's got the clenches and all that, and so all of the soldiers in that Roman army were themselves citizens. And this was, for a bunch of these authors, 17th century, 18th century. This was the model of how to be a free state. And there's this whole other narrative that comes along that really places these first century BC reforms in the spotlight where you got to a point where there were too many poor citizens and one of the government leaders decides well, head to all these poor citizens by giving them a career option as soldiers. And, as the story goes, this basically turns Rome's army from a citizen's army to a professional army. And this leads up to a situation where Julius Caesar he's just gone and conquered Gaul it's basically France now and he's heading back to Rome and he thinks that he's going to get arrested when he roves France.

Speaker 2: 17:06

And the rule was that you, as a Roman general, couldn't march your troops into Rome, and specifically, you couldn't cross the Rupicon River. And so I'll do these. It's a very common term now, that's crossing the Rupicon, but this was a very specific thing that Julius Caesar marched Roman soldiers on Rome itself, because they weren't really Roman soldiers anymore Once they became professionalized, they were Julius Caesar soldiers and because they were loyal to Caesar and not to Rome, they did what the earlier generations of citizen soldiers never would have done. Because of that, how Rome's Senate what was Republican about the Republic along with was powerless, and I mean they had another army that was willing to fight, but Julius Caesar won the ensuing Civil War and the Republic never recovered. Even after Julius Caesar was assassinated, the Republic never would recover. So there's just a bunch of lessons right in there that all of the Founding Fathers is a term I tried to like fail All the Founding Bothers, no.

Speaker 2: 18:20

And so if you have control over the army, the army is loyal to you. You could have as much political power as you want, and this was and that kind of power could kill a Republic. And because I've seen that did I do think there's some restubing in this aspect at the Second Amendment Did Allah can't govern the military. The law can't control the military. The law said that the Roman general can't arch their troops, his troops, and cross the Rubicon. So what happens when Caesar does that. Well, he has an army. You can't just say, you can't just go give them speeding tickets. There's no other force in there capable of imposing its will on what's already the largest and most successful army.

Speaker 2: 19:12

And this was an understanding of the relationship between politics and the military. They was at the forefront of a lot of 18th century thinkers' minds. This is why there's a society of Cincinnati and not a society of Caesar, because Cincinnati was the leader who gave up his power that he could have, but Caesar was the one who. Hey, caesar and Cromwell, I should say. But Cromwell's a more complicated story to tell. See, this was you know, so many of these lessons were there.

Speaker 2: 19:47

And George Washington? He talks about what he wants out of his army or his militia. He talks about, you know, we can look at the story the Republic's a precinct wrote and we can look at what mercenary armies have done, the damage they've done. So that's why I wanted to include that. And this is this is the nice thing about writing a book. I'm an academic but I don't know that I can't just write a journal article or a legal article about Julius Caesar. I've got no business doing that, but I had you know again. I tried to sort of read the stuff and figure out where it sent me. I had no thought, you know, in 2014, that it would send me to, in 2013, 2014, it would send me to looking at teaching role. But this is, this was the story that kept coming up.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Yeah, when you trace it, trace it backwards.

Speaker 1: 20:45

I just I think it's interesting because one of the things that will come up a lot, particularly when we're having kind of legal arguments around the Second Amendment or the idea of like originalism, is that British common law will get brought up a lot and the idea that because, understandably, a lot of especially early American colonial decisions are obviously born out of British law right, it's a, in many cases it's almost like a copy paste in a new context.

Speaker 1: 21:09

But then to think about, well, where did those laws come from, where did that conception come from, and to trace it out, I think is actually really helpful, because understanding and maybe this is me putting on like a little like cultural anthropologist hat for a moment but like to trace out how people are thinking about things when they're making the laws that are then governing folks all the way up into like 2023 and beyond, like that I think is an important thing to trace. And, yeah, you wouldn't expect necessarily that Caesar is going to pop up, but to slide back in. So like, eventually we do and within the text we're talking in like a colonial and then early postcolonial America and, if we can, I'd love to talk really briefly about how, like even within that that quick time change between so right pre-revolution and then right post-revolution, how this idea of a militia even changes in that context so quickly over the course of like two decades, which really, like in the grand scheme of history, is a blip.

Speaker 2: 22:04

Yeah, historical time is weird, though. Nothing changes, nothing changes and everything changes, and then you try to look through and see where the clues were. One of the things that helped me figure out this whole story, I guess I should say when I was writing this. The title was the Long Road to the Second Amendment Ten events in the making of the 18th century. Since the soldier and Virginia depressed and were like yeah, that's not a good title, you have to change it.

Speaker 1: 22:34

True to the times the armed citizens is very catchy Well that's why they knew these things.

Speaker 2: 22:39

I mean, I don't know big standup, you know the vanguards and you might just write. So I took the word on it. But I always had this sense that there had to be ten, which turns out didn't have to be ten, but B that this thought of a road to the Second Amendment, and it's actually pretty far into the book where I this is going to sound dumb but it gets way but where I realized that the road separates for a little while, that there's all these theorists, political writers, talking about how great the militia is, and then the colonists. You know theorists for the most part they're back in treatment in England and Scotland. The colonists just have. They have militias because there's no money for soldiers. There's.

Speaker 2: 23:25

England wasn't in the scent until until the Seven Years War, the French and Indian War. England wasn't in the scent of soldiers out to to North America. It was already kind of a questionable economic benefit in the first place. So all these colonists are living these lives, which includes militia, indian delicious, finding its different roles, enforcing slavery in the South and dispossessing Native Americans along the frontier, and here it kind of figured. You know it's very little quirks and rituals in more settled parts of the North. But when the British start stationing troops in North America, especially the troops they were stationing around Boston, in New England, suddenly that whole tradition of criticisms of standing army, suddenly that became very relevant to provide a way for the calmness to articulate what they viewed as injustice and tyranny. And so in that sense the way people understood militias really did change. Now there was also the whole Minutemen thing where you know, massaged other people.

Speaker 2: 24:37

You know a lot more about this than they did. But obviously Massachusetts and not only Massachusetts really ramped up their training. So the Minutemen who fought at Lexington and Concord, they were much more ready than anybody would have been two years earlier for that kind of confrontation. So these things had changed.

Speaker 1: 24:59

Yeah, there's just that kind of like swerve in the road of, if you will I'm not good with road metaphors but just that little swerve and I want to. Maybe we can do a big picture for a moment. But overall, why? This is a very unfair question to ask an author. But, like, why is this ultimately important? Or possibly kind of what hopes do you have in terms of a might, kind of change folks's awareness of, kind of the reality of what the Second Amendment was, and kind of might but as a result, you know, is it's?

Speaker 2: 25:32

a fair question, one of the. I don't know if you put this, but when I was getting trained as a historian there was some of the early lessons I got that shaped my approach Even. You know, I was reading a lot of the French Revolution stuff and there was this whole. I shouldn't get too into the weeds on this, but there was a real decline of Marxist explanations of the 18th century revolutions and sort of criticism of those that people had spent too much time looking for 19th century categories in 18th century history and it really what people should have been doing is, you know, trying to understand the categories of the people of the 18th century themselves used and that the more you try to tailor your research to contemporary questions, the more you you miss see what you should be seeing.

Speaker 2: 26:28

Now I think I probably took that a little too far in my first two books. You know, like I said, when you came trying to, you know, to do the three, I was, you know, angry at myself for the kinds of work I had been doing. It's probably a little harsh, but at that moment that was what I felt. But I'm still a historian. I still think that at the base of this is simple belief that people should know what happened and you should spread knowledge about the past, and so I didn't try to come at this with really specific, concrete goals.

Speaker 2: 27:06

You know, as I say, that I'm kind of wondering. I've never said it quite like that, so now I'm having some self-doubt to start this interview. But you know, there's a lot of bad history at the second minute and legal history tends to be worse. But you know, and I've read bad books I agree with, I read bad books I disagree with. I've read some good books that I disagree with and I just.

Speaker 2: 27:36

But there's this, you know, we're going to go into the past and see that there was an individual right to their arms. We're going to go into the past and see that there was not an individual right to their arms, and to me that's not what history is. I mean, you can do a history of the individual right to their arms, but just this sort of argument based on these very contemporary notions about what you know, what the second image should be, I, just as a historian, I just thought that whole approach was was awesome, and I guess I'm still willing to put, you know, the immediate political implications to the side while I'm on the research. And what if you come at this as an 18th century scholar before being a gun scholar or a militia scholar or a free speech scholar, or it almost doesn't matter. You know that the 18th century was very different and you don't have to worry about it somehow proving you wrong or right, you know confirmation bias there, because there's nothing to confirm.

Speaker 1: 28:40

You're just trying to see where it is.

Speaker 2: 28:42

Like we want to go back to that. Like when you, when you study the 18th century there's just four earlier centuries there's just things you know, like I don't study vaccines, I don't study mortality, but you just know that around half of the you know, like everybody you study, if they have children, around half of the children will die before they reach adulthood. And it's just you know, it's just part of the background. Like this is, we're not trying to recreate this, this 18th century rule. Look, I'm kind of obsessed with these 1690s texts and all these ideas that they had about soldiers make better citizens and citizens make better soldiers. But if anybody like what I would say is, if you, for anybody that really wants to understand this mindset, those texts are the place to start. Look, some people don't want to read history, and I get that. For most people who do like reading primary sources, there's just this energy just jumping off of those pages, their anger at these standing armies, their glorifications the malicious. But you probably know better than me, your audience, if they do tolerate Kafka-Ballabscher texts from the 1690s, and so I wanted to. I knew that that was going to be the case. I knew that it was always going to be the argument to make that the 18th century wrote a very different world and it's silly of us to think that we're staying true to it.

Speaker 2: 30:05

Now I do think that how do I put this? I'm not trying to do anything like save the Second Amendment from you know, like I don't need to do that. I think there are questions that lay behind the Second Amendment that are still worth asking. So I always like to go back to the Virginia Declaration of Rights and it's okay if I read this Did a well-regulated militia composed of the body of three people trained to arms the proper, natural, safe defense of a free state? That standing armies in time of peace should be avoided as dangerous to liberty and that in all cases, the military should be under strict subordination to, and be covered by, the civil power. This, to me, is a longer version of the first half of the Second Amendment.

Speaker 2: 30:54

Now, this is the Virginia Declaration of Rights. It's the Second Amendment I get. It's actually in the Bill of Rights, it's in the Constitution. It can be another one, but I like the way this kind of has the different parts spelled out. You can see this, and I do see this as the ultimate goal in this is to make sure that the civil power for us to be, congress and the president, but especially Congress can maintain control over the military, and that's a legit issue. It's a legit issue in every country. As Americans, we've kind of cocky about this because we haven't had issues like that. I think, well, I'm going to get in trouble because actual American historians listen to this and they'll be able to point us into big things.

Speaker 2: 31:44

But widespread, or like yeah, myanmar, the military walks in election and they just decided that they were going to take power instead. And it's sort of worst case scenarios. If Mark Milley wasn't the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff last January 2021, if Mike Flynn had been the head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then do we have a situation where the military no longer wishes to be under strict civil recognition to the civil power? And if that's the case, do we still have a republic? And the other thing is, the people who wrote this stuff were very explicit that they didn't use the term a military coup. But a military coup is something you want to worry about too early, not too late.

Speaker 1: 32:33

Which makes sense. If you are actively, as happens, in the revolution, if you are actively participating in an active, open rebellion against your home government, it makes sense that your concern is then is this just going to keep rolling, and will we eventually, instead of be a new state that then falls into a failed state? It makes sense in that context.

Speaker 2: 32:53

It does and they really do have to. It's a very basic dynamic, which is that they fight for freedom as they understand it, which obviously African Americans understood it differently, but they're fighting against here and as they understood it they've got some sort of oblivion to not be Kyren's intern. But then there's this whole period during the Articles of Confederation where they don't feel like they can govern well, and often so they need to reduce stuff. Did you ever go see Hamilton? Did you know the music?

Speaker 1: 33:28

I'm familiar.

Speaker 2: 33:29

Yeah, the Thomas, that was a real nice declaration. Welcome to the present. We're running a real nation. I mean, I think that that has a certain wisdom to it. But they had complained about standing armies in Boston, so they can't just be setting them up in Philadelphia and New York. So, yeah, it was a sort of a tough. I don't even know what's the metaphor. I'm looking for some very basic metaphor. I'm looking for about balancing, but I'm not finding it.

Speaker 1: 33:57

Well, I think, ultimately, what this book does a good job of, and I think what our conversation has pointed out, is that these things are complicated and that's a very simple thing. It's a podcast on that shelf. This is complicated and that the sort of surface understanding that we are, that a lot of folks have of things which, for most part, is fine, right, like you don't need to be an 18th century scholar probably to walk around and interact with the world, but if you are talking about these things or this is something that's important to you, this is an important history to know and to engage with. And for me, as someone who, as we increasingly see more and more laws and rules and regulations that are coming from this original list and this isn't a visual medium, so people can't see my air quotes of a very particular view of history- Can I just note to them I'm cheating in my head and disdain the air quotes.

Speaker 1: 34:51

In agreement or air-cruity or no.

Speaker 2: 34:55

No, disdain it, the idea of originalism. Don't disdain it, your air quotes.

Speaker 1: 35:00

Yeah Well, I mean, hey, they can't see. I want to be clear. But oftentimes, even when historians are not, for a lot of those rulings famously in the Bruin decision historians were not even used or contacted. So it's a law scholar's view of history, right? So I think it's just it's really important for folks to be aware of, like, if we're going to be engaging in these things, to know the history behind them. This is important. This is vital, so I really appreciate it. So where can folks find it? Where can they find you and your work? Where can they find you?

Speaker 2: 35:35

So I have. The book is from the University of Virginia Press, as I've said, and so they have. I don't know. Hopefully you'll have a link on the page notes.

Speaker 1: 35:43

I do. I'll have a link in the description of the episode. If they just want to click that, they can go that way. But here.

Speaker 2: 35:48

I'm sure any decent search engine will find you. The University of Virginia Press, and they are. The book is titled Armed Citizens. I have a somewhat outdated webpage but I have plans for the summer to update it.

Speaker 1: 36:01

Well, I'll link to that too and then that way folks can go check it out. Please, everyone, check out Armed Citizens. It definitely gives you an amazing primer on how we got here, for better or worse. And thank you again so much, dr Schusterman. This was a delight hey want to share with the podcast Listeners can now get in touch with us here at Red Blue and Brady via phone or text message. Simply call or text us at 480-744-3452 with your thoughts. Questions concerns ideas, cat pictures, whatever.

Speaker 3: 36:33

Thanks for listening. As always, brady's lifesaving work in Congress, the courts and communities across the country is made possible thanks to you. For more information on Brady or how to get involved in the fight against gun violence, please like and subscribe to the podcast. Get in touch with us at BradyUnitedorg or on social at BradyBuzz. Be brave and remember. Take action, not sides.