I’m a former Professor of Criminology who has published over 200 works. While I have written about gun policy for 30 years, my first book on the topic was stimulated by the murder of an unarmed Trayvon Martin in Florida by an armed neighborhood vigilante who pursued Trayvon for no reason other than that he was a tall black male wearing a hoodie. I was outraged by the shooter’s contention that he was acting in self-defense. This case prompted me to write my book Confronting Gun Violence in America which included two chapters on the issue of defensive gun use.
I wrote...
American Carnage: Shattering the Myths That Fuel Gun Violence
Criminologist Thomas Gabor and activist Fred Guttenberg, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Jaime in the 2018 Parkland school shooting, dismantle some of the leading myths on gun violence. Many of these myths have been promoted by the gun lobby to facilitate gun sales and normalize the presence of guns in American society.
Using the most recent research and data, the authors take on beliefs, such as: 1) Gun laws are recent inventions; 2) Homes and schools with guns are safer; 3) Guns don’t kill, people do. The authors dissect the many myths that endanger Americans by keeping the country from adopting effective solutions to gun violence. They also provide guidance as to how misinformation on guns can be tackled.
Making a Killing is a powerful exposé of the highly opaque and unregulated gun industry.
Former NRA member Tom Diaz uses the gun industry’s own words to illustrate how manufacturers are making guns more lethal and appealing to those who will misuse them. Diaz shows that the industry does not represent certain American values but is simply a business, maximizing profit regardless of the cost to the country.
The gun industry is the last unregulated manufacturer of a consumer product in America, with a level of secrecy that makes the tobacco industry look like a model of transparency. This text blows away the smoke and offers a provocative analysis of gun violence in American society. Tom Diaz argues that despite endless rhetoric about the right to bear arms, the real story behind the epidemic of gun violence in America is the systematic increase in lethality by manufacturers. Diaz shows how during the 1980s and 90s the gun industry has sought to reverse declining profits by dramatically increasing the…
Private Guns, Public Health is a comprehensive, evidence-based review of research on the link between gun availability and mortality.
The book explains why policies are urgently needed to address America’s gun violence problem. Hemenway makes the case for a public health approach to gun violence prevention, as opposed to a reactive punitive approach anchored in the criminal justice system. It is not about banning guns but preventing violence in the same way that research-based practices led to dramatic reductions in fatalities arising from car accidents.
Measures supported by Hemenway include safe storage practices, addressing the mental health of the public, encouraging Hollywood to promote responsible gun ownership, preventing gun theft through safe shipping practices, regulating guns as a consumer product, and ensuring that all gun sales proceed through licensed dealers.
On an average day in the United States, guns are used to kill almost eighty people and wound nearly three hundred more; yet such facts are accepted as a natural consequence of supposedly high American rates of violence. Private Guns, Public Health reveals the advantages of treating gun violence as a consumer safety and public health problem-an approach that emphasizes prevention over punishment and that has successfully reduced the rates of injury and death from infectious disease, car accidents, and tobacco consumption.
Hemenway fair-mindedly and authoritatively outlines a policy course that would significantly reduce gun-related injury and death, pointing us…
Rampage Nation combines sober analysis with case material to produce an original and engaging book on mass shootings.
Klarevas has a unique focus—gun massacres or high-fatality shootings in which six or more victims die. You should read this book if you would like to know the impact of gun-free zones and armed civilians on mass shootings. This book makes it clear that successful prevention of mass shootings involves targeting both the perpetrator and the weapons that enable gun massacres.
In the past decade, no individual act of violence has killed more people in the United States than the mass shooting. This well-researched, forcefully argued book answers some of the most pressing questions facing our society: Why do people go on killing sprees? Are gun-free zones magnets for deadly rampages? What can we do to curb the carnage of this disturbing form of firearm violence?
Contrary to conventional wisdom, the author shows that gun possession often prods aggrieved, mentally unstable individuals to go on shooting sprees; these attacks largely occur in places where guns are not prohibited by law; and…
Henigan makes the first comprehensive attempt to debunk the slogans so effectively used by the gun lobby to impede gun law reform.
Lethal Logic provides insights into the tactics used by the National Rifle Association to block the most basic measures that can combat gun violence. The book uses a combination of storytelling and statistical analysis to eviscerate the myths propagated by the gun lobby.
"When guns are outlawed, only outlaws will have guns."
"An armed society is a polite society."
Who hasn't heard these engaging assertions, time and time again? Burned into the national consciousness by years of targeted, disciplined messaging by the National Rifle Association and others, they are just a few of the bumper-sticker slogans that have defined the gun control debate in America. Long ridiculed by gun control advocates, they are the first words that come to mind for most Americans when the gun issue is discussed.
Repeal the Second Amendment is a highly engaging book that makes the case for amending the Constitution in order to facilitate gun law reform.
Lichtman shows that gun controls were in place from the early days of the Republic and that the Second Amendment to the Constitution referred to the “right to keep and bear arms” within the context of militia service only. This right did not apply to an individual right to bear arms. In the 1800s many states prohibited the carrying of guns.
Lichtman provides a path forward to repealing the Second Amendment and addresses skeptics who claim that such an undertaking is a fool’s errand.
There's an average of one mass shooting per day in the United States. Given the ineffectiveness of the gun control lobby, it's time for a strategy with spine. In Repeal the Second Amendment, Allan Lichtman has written the first book that uses history, legal theory and up-to-the-minute data to make a compelling case for the amendment's repeal in order to create a clear road to sensible gun control in the US. Repeal the Second Amendment explores both the true history and current interpretation of the Second Amendment to expose the NRA's blatant historical manipulations and irresponsible fake news releases. Lichtman…
I’m a professional historian and life-long lover of early American history. My fascination with the American Revolution began during the bicentennial in 1976, when my family traveled across the country for celebrations in Williamsburg and Philadelphia. That history, though, seemed disconnected to the place I grew up—Arkansas—so when I went to graduate school in history, I researched in French and Spanish archives to learn about their eighteenth-century interactions with Arkansas’s Native nations, the Osages and Quapaws. Now I teach early American history and Native American history at UNC-Chapel Hill and have written several books on how Native American, European, and African people interacted across North America.
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
Long before the colonization of North America, Indigenous Americans built diverse civilizations and adapted to a changing world in ways that reverberated globally. And, as award-winning historian Kathleen DuVal vividly recounts, when Europeans did arrive, no civilization came to a halt because of a few wandering explorers, even when the strangers came well armed.
A millennium ago, North American cities rivaled urban centers around the world in size. Then, following a period of climate change and instability, numerous smaller nations emerged, moving away from rather than toward urbanization. From this urban past, egalitarian government structures, diplomacy, and complex economies spread…
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