Images of Gun History from Our Archives

Some of the most important essays on gun rights, gun culture, and the meaning of the Second Amendment have appeared in American Heritage over the last 50 years.

To know what the Framers intended, we need to understand the late-18th century historical context.

One of the best-known advocates of gun rights outlines where he thinks compromise is possible.

The Supreme Court left the door open for reasonable regulations of guns, if Congress has the will to act.

Given the recent tragic shootings, historians should play a role in providing dispassionate facts regarding the history of gun rights and gun control.

After ten years of research into the history of gun rights, it’s clear that most Americans' understanding of the “right to bear arms” is not consistent with historical facts.

To find out what the Founding generation said about "well-regulated militias" and the right to bear arms, we researched all the colonial and state constitutions enacted before 1791.

Here are the original opinion and dissents in the famous Supreme Court case that defined the modern version of the "right to bear arms." 

The GIs came home to find that a political machine had taken over their Tennessee county. What they did about it astounded the nation.

On a warm Florida evening in 1933 a madman with a pistol and a personality profile now all too familiar—“unskilled, unfriendly, unmoneyed, and unwell”—came within inches of altering the course of American history in one of its most critical moments