Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America

Adam Winkler's groundbreaking new work chronicles the story of America's political battles over gun control, and how, like abortion and health care, the heated gun controversy illustrates the increasing political divide between liberals and conservatives, between the concerns of urban residents and the cries of rural activists. Using the Supreme Court's landmark case, District of Columbia v. Heller - in which the 2008 ruling invalidated a law banning handguns in the nation's capital - as a launching pad, Winkler, a prominent law professor and Daily Beast columnist, models his overarching narrative after Anthony Lewis's classic Gideon's Trumpet. Winkler demonstrates that the Supreme Court case proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the plaintiff, Alan Gura, for while he was successful in challenging the D. C. handgun prohibition, the gun lobbyists lost a bigger struggle: their war to end gun control in America. Shuttling back and forth in history - examining post-Civil War prohibitions against blacks owning guns, FDR's first attempt to impose gun control legislation, or Ronald Reagan's (a Republican!) advocacy of gun control - Winkler reveals that guns have increasingly become the Rosetta Stone of American politics, and that no single issue reveals more about how America has tilted towards the right in the last 50 years. This potentially prize-winning work by an uncommonly gifted legal scholar, ultimately explores the political, social, and legal issues that have so fiercely divided a nation.