By Maya Trent · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Pandora Young on FishbowlLA, September 2011
In late September 2011, FishbowlLA covered UCLA law professor Adam Winkler’s new book Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America. The framing hook was a telling anecdote: when Winkler spoke to a TV-booking agent about promoting the book, the agent asked “which side are you on, far-right or far-left?”
Then
Adam Winkler was a UCLA School of Law professor whose scholarship focused on constitutional law and the Second Amendment. Gunfight was a substantive history of American gun regulation.
The booking-agent anecdote the original piece foregrounded was the substantive point. A scholar with genuine subject-matter expertise who declined to take a partisan side was, structurally, a difficult booking for a partisan-conflict-optimized TV-news format.
Now
Gunfight has continued to be one of the more-cited works of Second Amendment scholarship. Adam Winkler has continued at UCLA Law; his subsequent book We the Corporations (2018) addressed the history of corporate constitutional rights.
The 2022 Supreme Court decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen established a substantially more gun-rights-protective constitutional standard; Winkler’s historically-grounded scholarship has been substantially cited in the debates over the standard’s history-and-tradition test.
The 2011 piece reads now as a small documented moment of media criticism that has aged well.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.