Updated Nov. 29, 2009
Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, Professor Randy Barnett posts that the Joyce Foundation funded Second Amendment Research Center at Ohio State University has folded. A big Aloha to OSU's 2nd Amendment Center, one of the Joyce Foundation's attempt's to buy historical creds for the proposition that the Second Amendment and gun control are mutually exclusive.
Amusing anecdote: The center's director, Saul Cornell, apparently selected the term "gun" to be used as a keyword in searching for period documents to be placed in the Center's digital archive. This was a poor choice in trying to locate documents related to the Second Amendment since it does not contain that term. One of the most intersting things about the center's digital archive of "relevant" documents was that it consisted mostly of state militia laws. Not one of the Second Amendment's state or ratifying convention bill of rights progenitors nor any period discussions concerning them appeared in it.
My research indicates that in the entire forty to fifty thousand pages of existing ratification era documents relating to the U.S. Constitution the term "gun" appeared only two or perhaps three times. Not one page of those ratification era sources appeared in the OSU's Second Amendment Research Center digital archive, not even the few sources that did contain the term "gun". Due to its extremely rare usage in such period sources, the term was not even listed in the index of The Origin of the Second Amendment.
One of those rare period uses still sticks in the mind, though: "riphael-gun".
About
- David E. Young
- David E. Young is a recognized authority on Founding Era Second Amendment developmental history and documents. Alan Gura, winning attorney for individual rights in the 2008 U.S. Supreme Court Heller case, wrote in 2014 while discussing "the Second Amendment's history" that "the authoritative books on the subject are David E. Young’s The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms: A Definitive History of the Second Amendment and The Origin of the Second Amendment." The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms is the first complete fully documented book length treatment of the Second Amendment. The Origin of the Second Amendment: A Documentary History of the Bill of Rights in Commentaries on Liberty, Free Government and an Armed Populace 1787-1792 is a massive Founding Era document collection cited in the Emerson, Parker, and Heller decisions.
