The Second Amendment: The Intent and Its Interpretation by the States and the Supreme Court

This is a review of one paragraph of Mr. Charles' book, "The Second Amendment," specifically that constituting footnote number 27, the last one in Mr. Charles' Introduction. In footnote number 27, the author criticizes another Second Amendment related book, "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" by David E. Young. First, Mr. Charles indicates that "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" is poorly sourced” because it “only provides citations for the first 225 notes, but the book goes up to 746 notes.” He also complains that “these notes are often out of sequence” and gives the example “on page 212, it jumps from note 746 to 744 and then to 221.” Mr. Charles is correct that there are note indicators in "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" that are not in numerical sequence like normal endnotes, but he is not correct that it only provides citations for the first 225 notes. The out of order note indicators have a special leading symbol, a black square mark, indicating that they are direct page citations to a particular source, "The Origin of the Second Amendment," also by David E. Young. Here are all of the notes in order as they appear on page 212 of The Founders' View, the page mentioned by Mr. Charles: ▪742 220 ▪743 ▪746 ▪744 221 What Mr. Charles has overlooked is why the out of order numbers have leading square symbols and what that might mean. The “Table of Contents” for "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" indicates that there is a “Documentation and Short Title List” on page 239 of the book immediately preceding the Notes section. This section explains the documentation method and provides bibliographical information about short titles used in the note citations. This is the documentation information provided there: “Documentation and Short Title List There are two types of citation or note indicators found within the text. The first and more numerous type are direct page number references to the main documentary source, The Origin of the Second Amendment, which was edited by the author of The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms. These direct page number indicators always begin with a small, square symbol ▪ followed by the page number being referred to in the document source. Thus, for example, the indicator ▪287 is a direct reference to page 287 in The Origin of the Second Amendment. The second type of note indicators are traditional endnotes consecutively numbered from 1 to 225. The related citations are found in the Notes section, below, directly following this Documentation and Short Title List. The Short Title List contains more extensive bibliographic information for the Short Titles used for reference purposes within the notes.” There are actually about 645 notes in "The Founders View of the Right to Bear Arms," with approximately two-thirds of those being citations to sources in "The Origin of the Second Amendment" document collection. It is unfortunate that Mr. Charles did not notice the out of sequence notes always had leading square symbols, and that he failed to examine the documentation section when a question on documentation arose. Mr. Charles next criticisms are “looking at the notes Young does provide, his examination of all the revolutionary sources is miniscule compared to other scholars in this area. Unlike his "Origins of the Second Amendment," which provides copies of primary sources to examine, Young's "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" is a source that should not be heavily relied upon.” The purpose of "The Founders' View of the Right to Bear Arms" was not to document all of the revolutionary sources, which would probably fill volumes. Instead, it was to provide a short historiography pointing out the most relevant information from the Colonial through the Revolutionary and