Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control. (The Morality Behind The Second Amendment).

Nation of Cowards: Essays on the Ethics of Gun Control By Jeff Snyder Accurate Press, 174 pages, $24.95

Jeff Snyder's Nation of Cowards is a compilation of his essays on gun control published during the 1990s. That decade was one of both great hope and profound disappointment for proponents of the private right to keep and bear arms.

The hope came in the form of unexpected support from scholars in law, history, and the social sciences. Increasingly, research confirmed what had long been conventional wisdom among gun owners: The Second Amendment was indeed meant to protect the right of individuals to possess arms, and the possession of arms by the law-abiding public serves to deter criminal violence.

The disappointment was a public and media atmosphere that often made these new research insights politically irrelevant. During the '90s gun controllers gained traction unseen since the passage of national gun control legislation in 1968. Always a favorite of the national press, the gun control movement was greatly aided by the presidency of William Jefferson Clinton. The Clinton administration pushed the Brady Bill and assault-weapons legislation through Congress, often steamrolling reluctant rural Democrats in the process. The Clinton administration clamored for further restrictions on firearms ownership, and conducted an open ideological war with the National Rifle Association, thus insuring that the gun issue would remain at center stage in national politics. Snyder wrote his essays in this charged environment.

A columnist for American Handgunner, Snyder makes his arguments from first principles. His signature essay, "A Nation of Cowards," first published in The Public Interest in 1993, sets the stage. The gun debate is one about the morality of self-defense. For Snyder self-defense is not only a right; it is a moral imperative. An unwillingness to defend oneself is not only cowardice, but supremely immoral, an unwillingness to defend God's greatest gift--life itself.

Snyder questions what had been the unchallenged pieties of the gun control movement. The movement wasn't simply about the control of weapons; it was an effort to truncate the right of self-defense, it agitated for a culture of nonresistance as a survival strategy tactically and morally superior to preparing and acting to defend oneself. Snyder is at his best in head on taking on this philosophical claim and pointing out its flaws.

Snyder's other essays continue the battle. Some challenge the myth that the assault weapons ban had crime-fighting utility. ...