What has it meant to take civil rights seriously-especially the right to bear arms-including in the years following the abolition of slavery? By quoting legislative debates, Congressional headings on Ku Klux Klan violence, and newspapers and law books of the time, constitutional scholar Stephen P. Halbrook shows that both supporters and opponents of the Fourteenth Amendment (1868) believed that it protected all Bill of Rights guarantees-especially the Second Amendment-from infringement by the states.