The Gun Dilemma

Reviews / Votes

The conservatives' campaign to expand gun rights through the legislatures and courts often is cloaked in faulty claims about American history. In this book, Robert Spitzer sets the historical record straight when it comes to regulating large-capacity magazines, silencers, and carrying guns in public, as well as with the particularly scary 'sanctuary' movement. Common-sense gun regulation, it turns out, is as American as apple pie, and there remains broad public support for that approach. Spitzer's well-founded concern, amply illustrated in this book, is that that approach is being trumped by a pro-gun judicial ideology, putting public safety further at risk. * Philip J. Cook, Professor Emeritus of Public Policy and Economics, Duke University * In an illuminating and wide-ranging analysis, Robert Spitzer demonstrates that many of the most pressing elements of the contemporary gun debate are, in fact, not all that new. Examining a number of different pressing areas of gun policy, this book makes clear that * despite being rife with claims about the role of guns in the country's pastthe US firearms debate often centers on a version of history that is incomplete at best and distorted at worst. Spitzer not only sets the historical record straight, but does in a way that sheds important light on how to navigate 'the gun fork in the road' at which the country finds itself.Matthew Lacombe, Assistant Professor of Political Science, Barnard College, Columbia University * In The Gun Dilemma, Robert Spitzer offers a master class in contemporary gun politics. Spitzer focuses on issues with major social implications: high-capacity magazines, silencers, and * most cruciallyguns in public places. The book sets the historical record straight and highlights crucial misperceptions among gun advocates and courts alike.Alexandra Filindra, Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology, The University of Illinois at Chicago * According to Spitzer (Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science Emeritus at SUNY-Cortland), the United States is at a gun policy fork in the road (ch. 1)... One path leads to violence * reducing gun laws that Spitzer argues American public opinion supports and asserts the country needs; the other path leads to regressive legal decisions expanding gun rights by Federalist Society-backed Originalist judges, especially on the Supreme Court (p. 22)... The Gun Dilemma was clearly finished right as the Supreme Court's Bruen decision was released in June 2022. In what reads as an afterthought, Spitzer notes that the decision is in line with the story he tells.David Yamane, Gun Curious * Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty; professionals. * Choice * As in his other work on gun policy, Spitzer writes in a way that is engaging and accessible to academics and non-experts alike. This book will surely serve as an indispensable resource for scholars seeking to better understand gun policy history. * Melissa K. Merry, University of Louisville, Perspective on Politics * Robert Spitzer's meticulously researched and engaging new book argues that many of today's judges and Second Amendment activists have weaponized history. They deploy crabbed and incomplete accounts of our past to make the case that most gun laws depart from our civil liberties traditions, and are the innovative 'product of modern American society.' In six pithy chapters, Spitzer shows that the 'opposite is true.' From colonial times to the present, federal and state gun regulations emerged whenever new weapons or technology posed threats to public safety. Legislation restricting firearms is, therefore, popular, recurring, deeply rooted, and 'as old as the country.' * Bruce Peabody, Farleigh Dickinson University, Law and Politics Book Review *