100 books like Loaded

I admire this book for its measured erudition on a topic (guns) that the author feels is the most formative cultural chasm in the US. Winkler, a renowned legal scholar, uses the 2008 Supreme Court Heller decision that enshrined the second amendment as an individual right to bear arms as the touchstone for a riveting and more wide-ranging investigation of the history of gun rights as well as gun control laws. Winkler finds historical precedents for the concept of an individual right (if not a mandate, in some cases) to bear arms.

However, what I found most surprising is Winkler’s account of the equally sturdy and deeply-rooted history of gun control and regulation. This revises the popular wisdom that gun control, essentially, has no history—that the US was a land of unfettered gun-toting and gun-owning that was only later thwarted by modern, liberal gun restrictions. On the contrary, by the… show more.

Busse offers the new perspective of an insider—an erstwhile gun executive. I’ve always held that the gun industry has gotten far too little attention historically, and that commercial forces substantially helped to create and then maintain the American gun mystique and culture long after the “frontier” closed. Busse’s work shows just how explicitly the gun industry today, since 9/11 and the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, relies on “manufactured fear” to push products. The book teems with examples of fear marketing, including endorsements from social media celebrities that created a new breed of “couch commandos,” steeped in the “glorification of violence, the utter rejection of political correctness, and the freewheeling masculinity and objectification of women.” And in Busse’s view it’s not just that gun marketing has changed, but that the gun industry has transformed American culture itself, radicalizing it and shifting it toward authoritarianism.

We’ve seen and felt this malevolence of… show more.

Columbine is a masterful piece of reportage from a journalist who covered from the start what is now perceived almost as a tragic prototype of mass school shootings in the US. Through meticulous, painstaking research—and with a compassionate and keenly observant voice that I especially admired—Cullen unspools the consequential misperceptions about the Columbine shooters that have distorted popular understandings of the “school shooter” ever since through repetition and media simplification.

What’s new and surprising here, and that remains relevant years after the book’s first publication, is that Columbine killers Eric Harris and Dylon Klebold weren’t victims of bullying, socially alienated by marauding gangs of “cool” kids and jocks, or radicalized by Goth culture. They had friends, jobs, and, perhaps most frightening of all, seemed largely to be average high school students, not appreciably different from our own children, who in fact did more bullying than they were bullied. “So we’re… show more.

Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline, does the rare thing of actually asking gun owners (she interviewed sixty of them) why they have guns, and what guns mean to them. As a sociologist, Carlson immersed herself in the “gun carry culture”—Americans who carry guns with them in everyday life, which is a new wrinkle in American gun culture. I was surprised by many of her findings and insights, and in some cases I was struck by their elegance; for example, Americans carry guns because they feel the US is “in decline” because of social chaos, and “guns are perceived as solving the problem” of that chaos.

What’s new and surprising here, and that I especially appreciated, is that Carlson in her own words “does something different” in this book, rejecting both the “gun politics” narrative that the “gun culture is an affirmation… show more.

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.

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.

An astonishing well-researched and detailed analysis of the arms trade and the omnipresence of guns in the world today. Full of startling and worrying statistics, for example, that there are 12 billion bullets produced every year which kill at least 500,000 people. The book reveals how in some places it is easier to get a gun than to get a glass of water. Solo killers, the military, the hunters, the paranoid suburban Americans, they are all here, and it is not a pretty picture.

This is an excellent work in which Dr. Miller smoothly blends the principles of modern psychology with the street realities of modern law enforcement situations. 

It is an excellent companion to my own work which focuses on cognitive factors in the criminal justice system, and also on my book, which deals with these factors in the realm of fire service and other first responder emergency operations. 

Dr. Miller gives a realistic view of psychology in the dangerous realm of law enforcement.

While Silverstein is most known for his wonderful compendium of poetry, Where The Sidewalk Ends, this was one of my favorite books as a child (and my sister’s too). Yes, it’s written for kids, but it’s still a great read as an adult, laugh-out-loud funny – and ultimately, very affecting. As you may have deduced from the title, it’s about a lion who figures out how to shoot back to defend himself and his pride against hunters – which then sparks an extremely inventive and surprising journey. Plus, it is deftly illustrated by Silverstein as well.

Moral Contagion tells the shocking story of the Seamen Acts, under which free Black sailors were imprisoned during their stay in southern ports during the antebellum era.

At least 20,000 free Black maritime workers, mostly from Britain and northern US states, were confined—and an unknown number, abandoned by their captains, were sold into slavery. The presence of free Black people in the South—widely feared as a source of “moral contagion”—contradicted the logic of slavery and threatened the very survival of that institution.

Why do I include this book on a list about US immigration history in the nineteenth century? Because, as Michael Schoeppner powerfully demonstrates, that history cannot be understood without considering the laws and policies controlling the movement of Black people in a slaveholding republic.