2A Authors

2A Authors: The Writers Who Shaped the Gun Rights Debate

Much of what gun owners know about self-defense, marksmanship and the history of the Second Amendment comes from a relatively small group of authors. Some were soldiers and trainers who wrote the manuals that taught generations to shoot. Others were historians and legal scholars whose research changed how courts read the Second Amendment. This page of Minuteman University.com profiles those writers, from the nineteenth century to today.

The earliest names on the list were practical teachers. General George Wingate, a co-founder of the NRA, wrote one of the first American rifle marksmanship manuals in the 1870s, and later authors such as William E. Fairbairn, Eric A. Sykes, Rex Applegate and Elmer Keith wrote influential works on combat shooting, close-quarters defense and handgun hunting. In the 1970s and 1980s a new kind of author emerged: scholars who examined the history of the right itself. Stephen P. Halbrook’s That Every Man Be Armed (1984) and Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms (1994) traced the right to its English and American origins, and their work was cited as the Supreme Court moved toward the individual-right reading in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008).

Defensive training and criminology produced their own classics. Massad Ayoob’s In the Gravest Extreme (1979) became a standard text on the law and ethics of lethal force, and John Lott‘s More Guns, Less Crime (1998) argued that right-to-carry laws reduce violent crime, a conclusion other researchers dispute, which keeps the book at the center of an ongoing academic debate. Today the list includes columnists, sociologists, trainers and journalists who write for gun owners across print, web and audio.

Timeline of landmark Second Amendment and self-defense books from 1872 to 1998

Pages in This Section

  • Fudd Media: writers in the gun press whose public calls for restrictions led to backlash, including the Jim Zumbo (2007), Jerry Tsai (2012) and Dick Metcalf (2013) episodes.

Key Works at a Glance

  • 1979: Massad Ayoob, In the Gravest Extreme, on the use of lethal force.
  • 1984: Stephen P. Halbrook, That Every Man Be Armed, on the history of the right.
  • 1994: Joyce Lee Malcolm, To Keep and Bear Arms, on the right’s English roots.
  • 1998: John Lott, More Guns, Less Crime, on carry laws and crime rates.

Related Pages

Sources

Fudd Media

  • Jim Zumbo (2007)

    • February 16, 2007 Zumbo published an entry on his blog
      – criticized the use of the AR-15 and AK-47 for hunting
      – calls for his termination were received within three days

  • Jerry Tsai (2012)

    • Sept 2012, RECOIL Volume 1, Issue 4
      – Tsai stated that civilians should not have access to firearms like the new H&K

  • Dick Metcalf (2013)

    • December 2013, Guns & Ammo Magazine
      – wrote an article on what he thought were appropriate limits to Second Amendment protected rights