guns 
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SOURCE: Truthout
4/22/2022
Politics as Usual Won't Stop Mass Shootings – A Discussion with Gun Culture Scholar Pat Blanchfield
Our society has developed and institutionalized a set of public rituals of disbelief and incredulity around mass shootings that direct anger and pain away from organizing and let politicians off the hook.
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SOURCE: Vice
3/24/2022
The Latest Technology Helping Gun Owners Violate Machine Gun Laws
Nearly a century of legislation aimed at keeping the public from having fully automatic weapons is being subverted by internet trafficking in cheap devices that modify popular Glock pistols to work as mini-machine guns.
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SOURCE: Made By History at the Washington Post
2/23/2022
The Sandy Hook Settlement Could Transform the Marketing of Guns
by Tracy L. Barnett
The settlement between Remington and the families of victims does not accept fault, but it does establish the dangerous connection between the marketing of guns as totems of masculinity and the damage done by young men who acquire them with ease.
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1/6/2021
A Year Later: Our Tattered and Fragile Democracy
by James D. Zirin
American political institutions face a crisis: can they defend themselves against a growing movement that will deploy violence to achieve its goals, or will January 6 become the new normal?
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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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SOURCE: Editorial Board
11/15/2021
Rittenhouse's Defense is Trying to Connect to a Long History of State Support for White Vigilantism
by Mia Brett
Police tolerance and even encouragement of the presence of Kyle Rittenhouse and other vigilantes on the streets of Kenosha in August 2020 was no anomaly.
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11/15/2021
Historians on the Kyle Rittenhouse Trial
As Kyle Rittenhouse's trial advances to jury deliberation, historians weigh in.
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SOURCE: The New Yorker
11/16/2021
How Much is the NRA to Blame for the Gun Culture?
Two new books help to shed light on how the NRA, partisan politicians, and the gun industry "took a political base of hunters and nurtured a new, expanded audience of gun guys," and how they made Americans live in their world.
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SOURCE: Gawker
11/16/2021
Kyle Rittenhouse is an American
by Patrick Blanchfield
"The impulse to reconstruct that night’s chaos as though watching a 21st century Rashomon, is a trap."
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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: NPR
11/9/2021
Secret NRA Tapes in Wake of Columbine Show Decision to Attack Critics for "Politicizing" Mass Shootings
The NRA faced a crossroads after the Columbine shootings in 1999. They chose a scorched-earth posture that has guided their response to every mass shooting incident since, documented in recordings of high-level strategy meetings.
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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: The Atlantic
10/27/2021
There's Little Doubt: The Second Amendment Threatens the First
by Diana Palmer and Timothy Zick
"In short, the visible presence of firearms increases the risk of violence and death when exercising one’s First Amendment rights."
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SOURCE: Washington Post
10/26/2021
Gun Culture is Priming Americans for Authoritarianism
by Ruth Ben-Ghiat
American gun culture devalues human life, desensitizes us to the presence of deadly force in our daily lives, and underlines the message that our fellow citizens are dangerous enemies.
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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: Made By History at the Washington Post
7/29/2021
Addressing Gun Violence Means Looking Beyond Policing
by Menika Dirkson
Between 1969 and 1976, Philadelphia saw success with a program to connect youth to social services, education and work opportunity, but turned toward militarized policing in the 1970s. This history should guide urban leaders away from the "tough on crime" approach.
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6/4/2021
Understanding Gun and Police Violence Lies Between History and Power
by Kwasi Konadu
Dealing effectively with gun violence and police violence requires recognizing they are connected by the long history of America's culture of force in defense of the social order. The National Gun Violence Awareness Day observed today should reflect this connection.
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SOURCE: New York Times
5/28/2021
Was the Constitutional Right to Bear Arms Designed to Protect Slavery?
Randall Kennedy reviews Carol Anderson's "The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America," and charges that Anderson overstates the influence of suppressing slave rebellion on the drafting of the Second Amendment.
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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: Chronicle of Higher Education
3/29/2021
Montana Universities Prepare for Guns on Campuses
Montana's public universities are struggling to plan for the consequences of the legislation signed in February allowing open and concealed carry of firearms on campuses.
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