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  • Originally published 04/07/2018

    How M.L.K.’s Death Helped Lead to Gun Control in the U.S.

    LBJ had used the death of President John F. Kennedy to pass the Civil Rights Act, and wrung the Voting Rights Act from the Bloody Sunday march from Selma to Montgomery. In 1968 he used MLK's death to pass the Gun Control Act.

  • Originally published 03/01/2018

    This Is How You Get Gun Control

    Bruce W. Dearstyne

    It’s what happened after several headline-making shootings captured public attention a century ago.

  • Originally published 02/27/2018

    Both Sides Have Been Getting the Gun Debate Wrong

    Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz

    We have a gun culture not because of the sanctity of the 2nd Amendment, but because killing, looting, burning, raping, and terrorizing Indians were an American tradition and militias helped carry out these horrors.

  • Originally published 12/12/2017

    The Brutal Origins of Gun Rights

    Patrick Blanchfield

    A new history by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz argues that the Second Amendment was intended to perpetuate white settlers' violence toward Native Americans.

  • Originally published 10/03/2017

    26 Gun murders (equiv. 130) in England vs. *11,004* in US Annually

    Juan Cole

    The United States continues to be peculiar in handing out powerful magazine-fed firearms to almost anyone who wants one and not requiring background checks on private purchases even if these are made at gun shows or by persons with a history of mental illness.

  • 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 10/05/2015

    How Gun Control Came to Britain

    Luke Reader

    It happened in 1996 after a former scoutmaster shot dead sixteen five-year olds and a teacher before turning the gun on himself.

  • Originally published 08/05/2015

    The Second Amendment Con Job

    Gregory J. W. Urwin

    The founding fathers agreed to the Second Amendment in order to assuage the public, which worried about the Constitution's provision for an army.

  • 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 11/18/2013

    War Was Becoming Obsolete in 1884?

    William J. Astore

    The American philosopher John Fiske predicted war would become obsolete in his 1884 "The Destiny of Man."

  • 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 03/25/2013

    Steven Conn: The Fetish of States' Rights

    Steven Conn, editor of To Promote the General Welfare: The Case for Big Government (Oxford University Press USA/2012), is professor and director of Public History at Ohio State University. Ronald Reagan kicked off his presidential campaign in 1980 with a speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi. It's worth remembering, especially in light of several recent events, why that was so important.Philadelphia was a small sleepy town like dozens of others in the South, brutally segregated according to Mississippi law and customs, just like dozens of others. It became nationally famous -- and symbolic -- when three civil rights workers doing advance work for Mississippi Freedom Summer in 1964 were murdered by some of the local white supremacists. They instantly became martyrs to a heroic cause.Sixteen years later, candidate Reagan didn't mention James Cheney, Andrew Goodman or Michael Schwerner in his speech. Instead, Reagan announced: "I believe in states' rights," and he promised the all-white Mississippi crowd that he would "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them."

  • 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 01/16/2013

    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 07/09/2002

    Could Bellesiles's Problems Undermine Gun Control?

    Don Williams

    Emory University recently announced that an outside panel of scholars will examine Michael Bellesiles’s Arming America—with results to be announced this summer. If the investigation discredits Bellesiles then it could hurt the arguments filed by gun-control advocates in a major Second Amendment case ( US vs Emerson) that is coming before the Supreme Court.

  • Originally published 10/09/2017

    The Teen Killer Who Radicalized the NRA

    Gil Troy

    Harlon Carter transformed the NRA from a rifle club into the take-no-prisoners anti-gun-control powerhouse. But he also had a very dark past.

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