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  • Originally published 10/14/2016

    Guns, Empires and Indians

    David J Silverman

    Multilateral imperial politics triggered an indigenous arms race and led to the violent transformation of Native America.

  • Originally published 07/12/2016

    The Paradox of Gun History

    Pamela Haag

    Today, guns draw political authority not only from foundational views of the Second Amendment but also from the narrative of their timelessly central place in history.

  • Originally published 06/17/2016

    How does Orlando massacre fit in US history?

    Mass violence has "a long, ugly history" in America, said Katherine Grandjean, history professor at Wellesley College. "It's a pattern as old as the nation and goes back long before even into the colonial roots."

  • Originally published 06/14/2016

    A New Way Forward After Orlando

    Max Boot

    The way to finally defeat ISIS is not simply by dropping more bombs is to woo Sunnis in Syria and Iraq away from ISIS by offering them a political end-state they can support.

  • Originally published 12/09/2014

    Does Gun Control = Death Control?

    William Heuisler

    "Eleven American cities – Chicago, New Orleans, Detroit, Los Angeles, Jacksonville (Fla.), Miami, Orlando, Omaha, Atlanta, Aurora, IL, and Dallas, account for over 70% of all American gun homicides."

  • Originally published 12/13/2013

    White Men and Their Guns

    Leonard Steinhorn

    When white men parade their firearms in public, it's not to deter crime, but to summon our deference.

  • Originally published 07/07/2013

    MLK's Forgotten Plan to End Gun Violence in Chicago

    Simon E. Balto

    Although fully ignoring the plights of poor urban areas was not quite what Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant when, in 1970, he encouraged President Richard Nixon to take a position of “benign neglect” around questions of racial justice, that has nevertheless been precisely what has happened. 

  • Originally published 05/09/2013

    Alan Brinkley: Fighting the Gun World

    Now, almost five months after the killing of 20 first-graders in Newtown, Connecticut, riveted the nation, Senator Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) is talking about trying to resurrect his bill on gun background checks that was defeated in the Senate last month.

  • Originally published 05/06/2013

    Incoming NRA president calls Civil War the "War Of Northern Aggression"

    "The NRA was started, 1871, right here in New York state. It was started by some Yankee generals who didn’t like the way my southern boys had the ability to shoot in what we call the 'War of Northern Aggression.'  Now, y’all might call it the Civil War, but we call it the War of Northern Aggression down south."

  • Originally published 04/18/2013

    The Senate's Shameful Lack of Courage on Guns

    Walter G. Moss

    “These [46] senators made their decision based on political fear and on cold calculations about the money of special interests like the National Rifle Association."--Gabby Giffords

  • Originally published 02/07/2013

    What's Still Missing From the Gun Control Debate

    Jim Sleeper

    Behind the gun control debate lies a deeper one that we need to have. It would show that the danger to our freedom isn't coming from government censors and conspiracies but from marketing sensors that are bypassing our brains and hearts on the way to our gut instincts and wallets.

  • Originally published 02/07/2013

    Did gun control enable the Holocaust?

    As gun control moved toward the top of the American agenda after the Dec. 14 massacre at a Connecticut elementary school, gun rights activists began to invoke a curious analogy: the Holocaust.

  • Originally published 01/22/2013

    Missouri GOP Rep.: Japan Didn't Invade U.S. in World War II Because of Armed Populace

    There are good reasons to bring Japan into the gun control debate in the United States: the relative success of firearms regulation in Japan, the recent rise of gun violence connected to organized crime, the history of weapons-carrying elites, etc. But WWII had nothing whatsoever to do with gun rights, gun control, or the 2nd Amendment.

  • Originally published 01/17/2013

    David Barton: History proves armed elementary kids prevent school shootings

    Conservative host Glenn Beck and "historian" David Barton on Tuesday debuted a new show called "Foundations of Freedom" and suggested that history proved that school shootings could be prevented if all elementary school children were armed.After pointing out that some areas of the United States required every household to own a gun in the late 1800s, Beck told Barton that "everybody grew up with a gun" and it was "part of school."Barton noted that guns were only fired in schools at the time to stop criminal activity."The great example, in the 1850s you have a school teacher who's teaching," the historian explained. "A guy, he's out in the West, this guy from New England wants to kill him and find him. So, he comes into the school with his gun to shoot the teacher, he decides not to shoot the teacher because all the kids pull their guns out and point it at him and say, 'You kill the teacher, you die.' He says, 'Okay.' The teacher lives. Real simple stuff."...

  • Originally published 01/16/2013

    King’s daughter, others say nonviolent message relevant as ever after Connecticut shootings

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. — While the nation struggles to agree on how to curb gun violence, followers of a man gunned down nearly 45 years ago think his wisdom offers an answer.The words of Martin Luther King Jr. and the role he set for churches in leading a nonviolent response to civil injustice are as applicable today as they were in the 1960s, say his younger daughter and other followers.Bernice King, chief executive of the King Center in Atlanta, recalls a sobering statement from her father: “The choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence, but nonviolence and nonexistence.”King’s lessons take on new urgency after one of the worst mass shootings in U.S. history, when a gunman opened fire at an elementary school in Newtown, Conn., last month, killing 20 children and 6 adults....

  • Originally published 01/16/2013

    In gun debate, even language can be loaded

    WASHINGTON — When the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence wanted to promote more restrictions on firearms after the Connecticut school shootings in December, it turned to a firm to help publicize its position. The firm’s name? Point Blank Public Affairs....The ubiquitous nature of such language has caused people on both sides of the emotional debate in recent weeks to take back, or at least think twice about the phrases they use, lest they inadvertently cause offense in a moment of heightened sensitivity.“It’s almost second nature,” said Andrew Arulanandam, director of public affairs for the National Rifle Association. “They’re such mainstream phrases, you almost have to check yourself and double-check yourself.”But it also says something about the long American romance with guns and the nation’s self image. “All of that ties into the frontier tradition, rugged individualism, a single American with a flintlock or a gun of some kind holding off the Indians or fighting off the British,” said Robert Spitzer, a scholar of gun control at the State University of New York at Cortland....

  • Originally published 01/11/2013

    The Real Origin of America's Gun Culture

    Carole Emberton

    Replica of a Colt 1851 Navy revolver. Credit: Wiki Commons."I'm here to tell you, 1776 will commence again if you try to take our firearms!,” radio host Alex Jones warned British television journalist Piers Morgan on Monday. Leading the charge to have Morgan deported for voicing his opposition to America’s lax gun control laws, which many believe led to the shooting deaths of twenty children and six adults last month at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, Jones attempted to cast Morgan as a modern-day Tory ready to reclaim the United States as Great Britain’s colonial possession. Although Morgan’s Britishness proved an effective prop to Jones’s revolutionary rhetoric, the current debate over gun control owes more to the Civil War Era than the American Revolution.