Regulation Was the Default: What Three Hundred Years of Weapons Laws Reveal About America

Ask most Americans about the history of guns in the United States, and you’ll hear a familiar story: an armed frontier, a free-roaming citizenry, and government regulation as a modern intrusion. Robert J. Spitzer’s new book, Gun Law History: How Three Hundred Years of Weapons Laws Built the Nation (Oxford University Press, 2026), challenges that story directly.

A record of thousands of laws

Spitzer gathers, for the first time in one place, the full range of old American weapons laws, numbering in the thousands. They span the 1600s through the start of the twentieth century. No earlier work, he argues, has presented a account of this history that is as comprehensive, coherent, and wide-ranging. What emerges upends many standard assumptions: contrary to American mythology, the default in American history was weapons regulation, not the absence of it.

Guns and the making of a nation

The book’s second contribution is its frame. Spitzer treats America as a developing nation-state, one that grew from a small, overwhelmingly agrarian, coast-hugging new country struggling for legitimacy into a transcontinental, industrial, urbanized giant. Weapons regulations, he argues, were central to that development, and were integral to the broader aim of protecting the public peace.

Why it matters now

Since the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Bruen, courts have been asked to judge modern gun laws by whether they fit the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation. Spitzer’s analysis concludes that the Court’s reading of that history is almost entirely wrong. Whatever readers make of that conclusion, the book puts an unusually broad evidentiary record on the table at a moment when history is doing real constitutional work.

Who should read it

Scholars and students of history, law, and political science; litigators and policymakers working on firearm cases; and anyone curious about how the country’s past actually looked.

Get the book

Oxford University Press is offering 30% off the $29.99 cover price, bringing it to $20.99. Use code AUFLY30 at checkout: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/gun-law-history-9780197857267?lang=en&cc=us