PositiveBookforumHaag usefully reminds us that modern gun-rights ideology stems from the nineteenth century’s “market revolution”—i.e., the moment when cheap and reliable mass-produced firearms first became available to a national buying public ... Haag may have overstated her case, as she seeks to diminish the [Second] amendment’s legacy as a major influence on a modern gun culture created by determined capitalists. She is certainly correct to stress that the recently canonized Second Amendment is more a reflection of cultural and economic processes than the Founder-authored holy writ that the modern gun cult claims it to be. But to demonstrate that a powerful strain of political rhetoric is of recent vintage is not to argue it away—or to make the mythology of the gun any less compelling for its adherents.
