This book started with an essay I was asked to write for the Harvard Law and Policy Review. That work produced a manuscript so long that it was unsuitable for the format. It expanded from there, and I finally whittled it down into an article published as the centerpiece of the Connecticut Law Review’s 2013 Commentary Edition. Along the way I realized that the essay turned article was really a book.

I have benefited from the insights and comments of people who read versions of this work. Thanks to Bob Kaczorowski, Shelia Foster, Marc Arkin, Russ Pearce, Howie Erickson, Dan Richmond, Kimani Paul-Emile, Jack Krill, Nelson Lund, Jenny Brown, Laura Bair, Dick Lohkamp, Bob Levy, Steve Halbrook, Alice Marie Beard, Joyce Malcolm, Robin Lenhardt, Tanya Hernandez, and to the participants in the 2010 Fordham Law School Faculty Scholarship Retreat where I presented a version of this work. Thanks also to my coauthors on Firearms Law and the Second Amendment, Dave Kopel, George Mocsary, and Mike O’Shea, for their insights along the way. I owe a particular debt to Robert Cottrol and Don B. Kates for their friendship and pioneering scholarship.

Thanks to the research assistants who worked on different versions of this project. Tammem Zainulbhai and John Hunt helped at the beginning, before I thought that this was a book. John Paul Sardi, Giancarlo Stanton, Jacob Laksin, and Ellen Johnson saw it through to the end. Thanks to my wife, Jane, who, in typical fashion, was adept at something I was not good at and tracked down many of the images that appear in the book. Thanks to Katherine Epanchin-Butuc, Juan Fernandez, and Larry Abraham at the Fordham Law Library for retrieving a variety of obscure texts. Thanks to Fordham University for the sabbatical grant that gave me the time to distill a mountain of information into 150,000 words. And thanks generally to family and friends for tolerating in good cheer the countless hours that this project drained from other equally worthwhile things.