RICOCHET

How American gun culture came to be and what keeps it going.

This trenchant and timely study, written by a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who also happens to be a gun owner and believer in limited gun rights, presents an informed and persuasive case for the brutal absurdity of American gun culture. A “veritable witches’ brew of money, politics, and ideology,” the author explains, “has warped gun rights, opening the door to irresponsible marketing and accessibility of powerful weapons.” This warping has been aided, he notes, by longstanding national affections for both negative liberty (freedom from government intrusions) and aggressive self-assertion (a belief that any personal intrusions ought to be fiercely defended). The author presents exceptionally clear commentaries on the interpretive debates over the Second Amendment, the extremism and canny politicking of the modern NRA, and the cynical marketing of gun manufacturers that have attempted to exploit male insecurities and “wheedle their way into the lives of kids.” Another valuable contribution here is the author’s often revelatory investigations into the roles played in expanding gun rights by under-scrutinized figures such as St. George Tucker, Harlon Carter, and John Dingell. Much of the actual history of gun lobbying, we come to understand, has been obscured from public view. The book rightly concludes, after furnishing a series of lurid illustrations of firearms enthusiasm, that “modern-day gun culture has entered a phase akin to the late-stage Roman Empire, when success and power devolved into selfish extravagance.” A little more might have been said in this overview of American gun history to elaborate the discussion of racial anxieties as a driver of the nation’s obsession with firearms, though what is said on this topic is indeed still compelling.

A meticulously researched, illuminating exploration of American gun violence.