Say It With Bullets

The best writers communicate their ideas in the fewest words possible. So it was with the Founding Fathers: They crammed a lot of history and meaning into the sentence "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

In The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms: A Definitive History of the Second Amendment, David E. Young unpacks the much-debated right with extensive historical references. Critics will make a number of charges, and correctly -- Young is an independent, non-credentialed historian; he too often paraphrases his source material instead of using quotes; his prose is a bit awkward. But the book is an invaluable work for those who want to know the truth about guns and the Constitution, especially in light of the current Supreme Court case regarding Washington, D.C.'s gun-control laws. The debate rages: Can all individual Americans have guns, or does the Second Amendment only protect arms-bearing when it relates to the militia?

http://waronyou.blogspot.com/2008/02/say-it-with-bullets.html