Firearms Law Textbook 2024 Now Available

For free -- 566 pages

I'm pleased to announce the publication of the 2024 Annual Supplement for the textbook Firearms Law and the Second Amendment: Regulation, Rights, and Policy. The supplement is available here as a PDF.

The base textbook was published in October 2021, and is coauthored by Nicholas J. Johnson (Fordham), George A. Mocsary (Wyoming), E. Gregory Wallace (Campbell), Donald Kilmer (Lincoln), and me. The book's public website is here, and the Aspen Publishers page for the book is here. The 2024 Supplement is a guide to Bruen and the significant post-Bruen litigation.

While the 2024 Supplement discusses a large variety of cases, including state court cases involving state constitutional law, here are some of the major items:

• A long excerpt of Bruen, with many Notes and Questions, which point readers to leading pro/con scholarship about the case.
• A long excerpt of Rahimi.
• Updates on the latest social science and data.
• A long excerpt of Cargill v. Garland, on bump stocks, as well as updates on everything else about the National Firearms Act.
• A detailed essay by George Mason Prof. Robert Leider explaining the complexities of the major 2022 federal gun control statute.
• Analysis by attorney Johanna Reeves of ATF's "Frame or Receiver Rule."
• Cases summaries and excerpts on all the major issues being litigated under the Bruen framework, including prohibited persons, right to carry, bans on types of arms, and many other types of restrictions.
• And lots more!

But wait, that's not all. The base textbook is available in print, and (from the publisher's website for students and faculty) as an e-book. There are also seven free supplemental chapters available online, from the book's public website. These cover: Firearms Policy and Status; International Law; Comparative Law; In-Depth Explanation of Firearms and Ammunition; Antecedents of the Second Amendment; Arms Rights, Arms Duties, and Arms Control in the United Kingdom; and The Evolution of Firearms Technology from the Sixteenth Century to the Twenty-First Century.

Among the things you will find in the online chapters are 25 pages of in-depth research on the role of gun control and armed resistance in the Turkish genocide of Armenians and other Christians in the early twentieth century, a hundred pages about gun control and armed resistance in Communist China and Tibet; ancient Greek, Roman, and Chinese law and philosophy about arms; United Nations gun control; modern law about arms on Native American reservations; and many other topics.

We hope that in the 2024 Supplement and in the online chapters, students writing Notes and professors writing Articles may find interesting issues for further exploration. We also hope that judges, clerks, and litigators will find the 2024 Supplement to be a helpful guide to the post-Bruen legal environment, and that the two online chapters about firearms mechanics (how modern firearms operate; and the history of firearms development) may also be useful.