The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment
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- €10.99
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- €10.99
Publisher Description
“In this precise primer on firearms practices and policies, progressive talk-show host Hartmann examines the history of routine gun usage and extreme gun violence and assesses the influence of gun ownership on contemporary political, economic, and social norms…A brief but powerful analysis of a searing national crisis.” —Booklist
Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times bestselling author, looks at the real history of guns in America and what we can do to limit both their lethal impact and the power of the gun lobby.
Taking his typically in-depth, historically informed view, Hartmann examines the brutal role guns have played in American history, from the genocide of the Native Americans to the enforcement of slavery (Slave Patrols are in fact the Second Amendment's “well-regulated militias”) and the racist post–Civil War social order. He shows how the NRA and conservative Supreme Court justices used specious logic to invent a virtually unlimited individual right to own guns, which has enabled the ever-growing number of mass shootings in the United States. But Hartmann also identifies a handful of powerful, commonsense solutions that would break the power of the gun lobby and restore the understanding of the Second Amendment that the Framers of the Constitution intended. This is the kind of brief, brilliant analysis for which Hartmann is justly renowned.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this lucid but partisan treatise, Hartmann (The Crash of 2016), a nationally syndicated progressive radio host, dismisses the conventional wisdom that the Second Amendment was intended as a bulwark against an overreaching government. He contends that it was actually intended to serve two purposes: ensuring the continued existence of colonial "slave patrols" state-sanctioned militias that hunted escaped slaves and to prevent a standing army, which Thomas Jefferson believed was a threat to democracy that could only be remedied by a Swiss-style citizen militia. Hartmann follows this analysis with a passionately argued indictment of America's gun culture, which he identifies as the source of mass shootings and white supremacist violence. He criticizes current trends in the U.S. that facilitate gun culture, among them excessive money in politics (which allows gun manufacturers outsize political influence), a wrongheaded Supreme Court, and growing inequity in general, which 40 studies link to increased rates of violence in a society. Hartmann's proposed solutions include laws requiring "smart guns" that only fire for an authorized user, bans on semiautomatic weapons, and diminishing racial inequality (and therefore violence) through integration, reparations in the form of affirmative action, and better educational opportunities for African-Americans. This lucid but decidedly radical polemic will probably not convince those who disagree, but it will speak to progressives.
