Gun ownership is as old as the nation, but, as Robert J. Spitzer demonstrates in Guns across America, so is gun regulation. In vast swathes of America, the sanctity of the Second Amendment has become a political third rail, never to be questioned, yet by employing new research on early gun laws, Spitzer reveals that firearms were in fact more strictly regulated in the country's first three centuries than in recent years. The first "gun grabbers" were not 1960s Chablis-drinking liberals, but seventeenth century rum-guzzling pioneers, and their legacy continued through strict gun...