What would a history of guns in the United States look like beyond the Second Amendment? With good reason, gun histories have long been dominated by interrogations of this contentious constitutional right. The conservative intellectual effort since the 1970s to define the Second Amendment as a statement of an individual right to own a firearm independent of service in a militia, eventually codified in the Supreme Court decisions in Heller v. D.C. (2008), McDonald v. Chicago (2010), and, most recently, NYSPRA v. Bruen (2022), prompted a generation of historians to either contribute to or challenge that effort. Important works like Joyce Lee Malcolm’s To Keep and Bear Arms: The Origins of an AngloAmerican Right (1994) and Saul Cornell’s A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (2006) have offered opposing perspectives on the Second Amendment’s origins and meaning, while scholarship addressing the twentieth century, like Adam Winkler’s Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America (2013), continues to focus on legal and rights-based frameworks for understanding the impact of guns in the United States.

This roundtable will present a conversation about new directions in U.S. gun history, attempting to define that history beyond the intellectual tradition of Second Amendment studies. How have and how can scholars conceptualize U.S. gun history outside of that tradition? Guns are conspicuous tools of violence, present throughout the country’s long history of state-sanctioned and social violence, but they are also consumer goods, objects of desire or fear, products of science and technology, and sources of political and cultural identity and conflict. And there are now more than 400 million of them in the country. Following recent trends in fields like sociology and political science, the panelists will consider the materiality of guns, objects with their own histories embedded in social networks and global capitalism, not simply abstractions to which legal concepts can be applied.

The roundtable speakers represent diverse methodological and chronological perspectives, covering the eighteenth through the twenty-first centuries. They bring approaches from cultural history to political economy to interdisciplinary cultural studies tools to the question of how historians can craft a history of guns in the United States beyond the intellectual battles over the Second Amendment. That diversity extends to their individual backgrounds as well as geographic location, drawing from the West, the South, and the Northeast.