Visiting Speaker to Discuss Second Amendment

Professor Saul Cornell of Fordham University will present “Race and the Second Amendment” at 7:30 p.m. April 4 in the Student Union Building Activities Room. He will explore contemporary arguments about the complex connections between race and the Second Amendment, with a particular focus on the period from the Revolution through Reconstruction.  

Cornell serves as Paul and Diane Guenther Chair in American History at Fordham and is the author of “A Well-Regulated Militia: the Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America,” as well as other books and articles. He is the director of the Second Amendment Research Center at the John Glenn Institute, and his recent work in The Atlantic on gun laws in the United States can be found here and here.

Presentation Abstract
Gun control proponents have claimed that the Second Amendment was adopted to protect Southern slave owners. Gun rights advocates in turn argue that the modern Second Amendment as incorporated by the Fourteenth Amendment was understood as a means to protect free Blacks from terrorist groups in the Reconstruction-era South and was used by Civil Rights activists in the ’50s and ’60s. Both of these claims contain important elements of truth, but each presents a partial account of the complex connections between race and the Second Amendment.