gun control 
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
6/5/2022
History Suggests Gun Control Will be an Uphill Fight
by Joanna Paxton Federico
The National Rifle Association has succeeded in blocking popular gun control legislation since it overcame strong public support in the 1930s for national handgun registration in FDR's "New Deal for Crime."
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
5/26/2022
Other Countries Figured Out How to Reduce Gun Massacres
Australia, Britain and Canada took decisive and successful steps to reduce mass shootings since the 1990s.
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5/12/2022
Why Andrew Jackson Believed in Gun Control
by Anders Walker
Andrew Jackson loved guns, but his correspondence with John C. Calhoun from 1818 shows that he believed that the Second Amendment didn't guarantee an individual right to own them and that regulation was key to public safety.
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6/5/2022
There Oughtta Be a Law
by Jim Zirin
A veteran prosecutor weighs in on how American law must erase the distinction between "fully automatic" and "semiautomatic" weapons and ban the weapons that are used in massacre after massacre.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
12/5/2021
Forget "Ghost Guns" and other Media Panics. Gun Capitalism is the Underlying Problem of a Violent Society
by Andrew C. McKevitt
A long series of moral panics over the dangers of specific guns (and their imagined users) has hidden the real danger to Americans: the profitability (and legality) of selling deadly weapons.
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11/14/2021
Will SCOTUS Force Us All to Find Out How Polite an Armed Society Will Be?
by Jim Zirin
The Supreme Court's oral arguments in a challenge to New York State's gun laws suggest the court is willing to defy precedent and history and assume a power that the Constitution reserves to the people and states, forcing all communities to accept the concealed carrying of firearms.
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SOURCE: The Conversation
11/4/2021
Why are Medieval Weapons at the Center of a Supreme Court Case?
by Jennifer Tucker
The history and traditions of English law inform American judicial interpetation today, including efforts to discern the functional meaning of the Second Amendment. A group of historians has briefed the Court that restricting dangerous weapons in public is long-established.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
11/3/2021
If the Justices Really Value "Originalism," They Can Only Vote One Way in Guns Case
by Saul Cornell
"If the justices professing to believe in originalism are sincere about their method, this case offers the rare opportunity to prove that originalism is not always a prescription for results-oriented judging that follows a conservative political agenda."
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SOURCE: CNN
8/28/2021
How Racism Permeates the Politics of Guns
Historians Carol Anderson and Yohuru Williams are featured in a new documentary examining the ways that American gun rights discourse has been filtered through racism.
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SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
4/20/2021
Caught in a Plague of Gun Violence (Letters from an American, April 19, 2021)
by Heather Cox Richardson
What explains the different reaction to two Valentine's Day massacres, in 1929 and 2018? Heather Cox Richardson examines the connections between a culture of individualism, desegregation, and guns.
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SOURCE: Heather Cox Richardson
3/23/2021
Letters From an American: March 23, 2021
by Heather Cox Richardson
Beginning in the 1970s, the National Rifle Assocaition evolved into a political lobbying organization increasingly enmeshed with the conservative movement. Two recent mass shootings are a tribute to the organization's success. Congratulations.
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SOURCE: Duke Center for Firearms Law
10/7/2020
Why Heller is Such Bad History
by Noah Shusterman
Antonin Scalia's opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller ignored the actual history of the early American militia in order to invent an individual right to gun ownership.
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10/18/2019
Understanding America's History Of Gun Control
by Samantha Benthien
As gun violence rates continue to increase, looking to America's history of gun control can provide insight into this polarized issue.
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SOURCE: Washington Post
9/12/19
When Texas was the national leader in gun control
by Brennan Gardner Rivas
How the land of gunslinger mythology regulated weapons to reduce violence
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SOURCE: NY Times
9/7/19
How Congress Passed an Assault Weapons Ban in 1994
With Congress prepared to again clash over gun safety, in the aftermath of a murderous August, the circuitous route to passage taken by the assault weapons ban 25 years ago illustrates just how perfectly the legislative stars must align for contentious gun measures to become law.
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SOURCE: News @ Wesleyan
8/23/19
‘A Right to Bear Arms?’ Edited by Jennifer Tucker, Barton C. Hacker, and Margaret Vining Explores History of Gun Debate
These essays offer both general readers and specialists a valuable study of how history itself has become a contested site within the wider national legal debate about firearms.
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August 11, 2019
Can the NRA Survive its Current Crisis?
by Robert J. Spitzer
The NRA is facing a serious crisis.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
8/6/2019
How the Trail of American White Supremacy Led to El Paso
We invariably find ourselves locked in conflict with dangerous men intoxicated with their own sense of mission, and drunkenly believing that the only problem with the past is that we ever departed from it at all.
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6/9/19
Political Corruption Underwrites America’s Gun-Control Nightmare
by Thom Hartmann
The story of the rich politician whose extreme corruption inspired the 17th Amendment--and how the Citizens United ruling allows money to rule politics once again.
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SOURCE: New York Times
3/9/19
The Black Gun Owner Next Door
by Tiya Miles
I’m an African-American historian and, on most issues, decidedly liberal. Could I rethink my anti-gun stance?
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