Includes bibliographical references (pages 195-254) and index.

"This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's fathers did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms--and that this intentional distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. Hundreds of lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers--it is also the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its Founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have ... ceded the big-picture argument on guns. As we parse legislation on background checks and automatic weapons bans, we fail to ask: do individual gun rights have any place at all in American democracy? Taking readers on a ... historical journey, Erdozain shows how the Founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings: the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the enduring republic they hoped to build"--