Ten of the best books on guns in America

Catherine Habgood is a writer and editor living in New York City. She is one of the fiction editors at The Washington Square Review and is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at New York University.

"To understand America’s complicated culture of guns is an interdisciplinary pursuit: legal, historical, sociological, economic," she writes at Lit Hub, shere she tagged ten "exemplary attempts at that understanding." One title on the list:

Carl T. Bogus, Madison’s Militia: The Hidden History of the Second Amendment, 2023

In Madison’s Militia, Carl T. Bogus shows that “the right to bear arms was not about protecting liberty but preserving slavery.” He argues that “a close examination of the context in which Madison drafted the Second Amendment reveals the text as an offering to white southerners preoccupied with containing slave rebellion and uneasy about losing control of the primary instrument for it, the militia” (The New England Quarterly). Carl T. Bogus is a professor of law emeritus at Roger Williams University, but Madison’s Militia is a history, told with the scrupulousness of a lawyer, “a surprisingly fast-paced account of the events leading up to the Second Amendment” (Jeannine DeLombard, author of In the Shadow of the Gallows).

Read about the other books on the list.

The Page 99 Test: Madison's Militia.

--Marshal Zeringue