Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea
Add to Wishlist
Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

by Joshua Horwitz, Casey Anderson

Overview


The NRA steadfastly maintains that the 30,000 gun-related deaths and 300,000 assaults with firearms in the United States every year are a small price to pay to guarantee freedom. As former NRA President Charlton Heston put it, "freedom isn't free."

And when gun enthusiasts talk about Constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind---freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government.

In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme "militia" groups to influence state and national policy.

In Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, Josh Horwitz and Casey Anderson reveal that the proponents of this view base their argument on a deliberate misreading of history. The Insurrectionist myth has been forged by twisting the facts of the American Revolution and the founding of the United States, the denial of civil rights to African-Americans after the Civil War, and the rise of the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler. Here, Horwitz and Anderson set the record straight. Then, challenging the proposition that more guns equal more freedom, they expose Insurrectionism---not government oppression---as the true threat to freedom in the U.S. today.

Joshua Horwitz received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. He is Executive Director of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence. He has spent nearly two decades working on gun violence prevention issues. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Casey Anderson holds a law degree from Georgetown University and is currently a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C. He has served in senior staff positions with the U.S. Congress, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence, and Americans for Gun Safety. He lives in Arlington, Virginia.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780472033706
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Publication date: 05/28/2009
Pages: 296
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.80(d)

Customer Reviews

Average Review

Write a Review

Share This Item

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

See All Customer Reviews

Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea 5 out of 5 based on 0 ratings. 1 reviews.
well-regulated-patriot More than 1 year ago
This book really blows apart the notion that private ownership of guns has any positive effect on maintaining "rights and freedoms" in a democratic society, in fact it shows the contrary. The book also contains some very detailed and well presented facts that counter the usual examples, used by the gun lobby, to support the idea that more guns keep people "free". It is clear from the book, that people need to make more of an effort to expand their concentration from the purely health and safety aspects of gun violence and start talking about the fallacious arguments that the gun lobby uses to link "unlimited and unregulated gun access" to "freedom" and even "patriotism"! This book contains some valuable quotes, references and ideas to spark the debate about which side of the gun rights/responsibilities argument really has claim to the "patriotic" high ground. Despite the heavy subject matter, the book is very readable and I found the arrangement of chapters took the ideas and built on them in layers to support the point. The olde English in the historic quotes and references is challenging (even for an olde Englishman), but they are very compelling proof of the original intent and mind set of our founding fathers and brothers.