guns

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• 1/6/2021
  

  A Year Later: Our Tattered and Fragile Democracy

  by James D. Zirin

  American political institutions face a crisis: can they defend themselves against a growing movement that will deploy violence to achieve its goals, or will January 6 become the new normal? 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  12/5/2021
  

  Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Underlying Problem of a Violent Society

  by Andrew C. McKevitt

  A long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons.

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• SOURCE: Editorial Board
  11/15/2021
  

  Rittenhouse's Defense is Trying to Connect to a Long History of State Support for White Vigilantism

  by Mia Brett

  Police tolerance and even encouragement of the presence of Kyle Rittenhouse and other vigilantes on the streets of Kenosha in August 2020 was no anomaly. 

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• 11/15/2021
  

  Historians on the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial

  As Kyle Rittenhouse's trial advances to jury deliberation, historians weigh in. 

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• SOURCE: The New Yorker
  11/16/2021
  

  How Much is the NRA to Blame for the Gun Culture?

  Two new books help to shed light on how the NRA, partisan politicians, and the gun industry "took a political base of hunters and nurtured a new, expanded audience of gun guys," and how they made Americans live in their world. 

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• SOURCE: Gawker
  11/16/2021
  

  Kyle Rittenhouse is an American

  by Patrick Blanchfield

  "The impulse to reconstruct that night’s chaos as though watching a 21st century Rashomon, is a trap."

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• 11/14/2021
  

  Will SCOTUS Force Us All to Find Out How Polite an Armed Society Will Be?

  by Jim Zirin

  The Supreme Court's oral arguments in a challenge to New York State's gun laws suggest the court is willing to defy precedent and history and assume a power that the Constitution reserves to the people and states, forcing all communities to accept the concealed carrying of firearms.

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• SOURCE: NPR
  11/9/2021
  

  Secret NRA Tapes in Wake of Columbine Show Decision to Attack Critics for "Politicizing" Mass Shootings

  The NRA faced a crossroads after the Columbine shootings in 1999. They chose a scorched-earth posture that has guided their response to every mass shooting incident since, documented in recordings of high-level strategy meetings.

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• SOURCE: The Conversation
  11/4/2021
  

  Why are Medieval Weapons at the Center of a Supreme Court Case?

  by Jennifer Tucker

  The history and traditions of English law inform American judicial interpetation today, including efforts to discern the functional meaning of the Second Amendment. A group of historians has briefed the Court that restricting dangerous weapons in public is long-established. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  10/27/2021
  

  There's Little Doubt: The Second Amendment Threatens the First

  by Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick

  "In short, the visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights."

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• SOURCE: Washington Post
  10/26/2021
  

  Gun Culture is Priming Americans for Authoritarianism

  by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

  American gun culture devalues human life, desensitizes us to the presence of deadly force in our daily lives, and underlines the message that our fellow citizens are dangerous enemies.

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• SOURCE: CNN
  8/28/2021
  

  How Racism Permeates the Politics of Guns

  Historians Carol Anderson and Yohuru Williams are featured in a new documentary examining the ways that American gun rights discourse has been filtered through racism. 

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• SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
  7/29/2021
  

  Addressing Gun Violence Means Looking Beyond Policing

  by Menika Dirkson

  Between 1969 and 1976, Philadelphia saw success with a program to connect youth to social services, education and work opportunity, but turned toward militarized policing in the 1970s. This history should guide urban leaders away from the "tough on crime" approach.

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• 6/4/2021
  

  Understanding Gun and Police Violence Lies Between History and Power

  by Kwasi Konadu

  Dealing effectively with gun violence and police violence requires recognizing they are connected by the long history of America's culture of force in defense of the social order. The National Gun Violence Awareness Day observed today should reflect this connection.

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  5/28/2021
  

  Was the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms Designed to Protect Slavery?

  Randall Kennedy reviews Carol Anderson's "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," and charges that Anderson overstates the influence of suppressing slave rebellion on the drafting of the Second Amendment. 

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  4/20/2021
  

  Caught in a Plague of Gun Violence (Letters from an American, April 19, 2021)

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  What explains the different reaction to two Valentine's Day massacres, in 1929 and 2018? Heather Cox Richardson examines the connections between a culture of individualism, desegregation, and guns. 

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• SOURCE: Chronicle of Higher Education
  3/29/2021
  

  Montana Universities Prepare for Guns on Campuses

  Montana's public universities are struggling to plan for the consequences of the legislation signed in February allowing open and concealed carry of firearms on campuses. 

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• SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
  3/23/2021
  

  Letters From an American: March 23, 2021

  by Heather Cox Richardson

  Beginning in the 1970s, the National Rifle Assocaition evolved into a political lobbying organization increasingly enmeshed with the conservative movement. Two recent mass shootings are a tribute to the organization's success. Congratulations. 

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• SOURCE: New York Times
  1/26/2021
  

  Out of the Barrel of a Gun

  The resurgent militia movement and renewed attention to the threat of political violence compels a reckoning with the vast number of firearms in America and with the political significance of guns. 

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• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  1/11/2021
  

  The Gun-Rights Movement Fed America’s Insurrectionist Fever Dreams

  by Firmin DeBrabander

  "The gun-rights movement cleared the path for insurrection. It blew a hole in the rule of law—and Donald Trump’s would-be soldiers clamored through it. And then scaled the walls of Congress."