One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History And Threatens Our Democracy, Erdozain - B

               Lyndon Johnson's National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence recommended that the 24 million handguns then in the US be reduced, by licensing, to 2.4 million. Today, there are over 200 million handguns in America.

             "There is no mystery to the Second Amendment.  The mystery is how one part of America convinced itself that privately held guns are the foundation of democracy, and how everyone else was bullied into acquiescence." "The norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of the founders." The Myth of the Law-Abiding Citizen says that guns keep us safe from bad people. However, studies have shown that 84% of deaths are "altercation homicides" that is, those between friends or family. It has also been proven that homicide rates increase when gun density rises.  States allowing concealed carry saw increases in murder rates after the laws' enactments. Reagan's support for the NRA led to assault rifles, high capacity magazines and "constitutional carry."

              The fear of standing armies led to the Constitution's granting to Congress the power "to raise armies." The result  was the 2nd Amendment which clearly referenced a collective duty in a states militia that gave rise to the right to bear arms. Under the common law and well into the 19th century in America, merely carrying a threatening weapon in public was a crime. However, the Civil War created a gun culture by the manufacture of millions of weapons, and the training of young men to use them. The second half of the century legitimized violence by vigilantes, and by anyone fighting the Indians, as the west was tamed.

             Handguns were sold everywhere and were widespread in the early 20th century. New York passed a law criminalizing possession of a handguns, and the American Bar Association recommended a national ban on the manufacture and sale of handguns. The NRA loudly protested that the reforms were an attack on white America, a guns were needed to deal with the vipers arriving on every boat from Europe. FDR tried twice to pass gun control legislation, but failed both times.

            John Kennedy was assassinated by a man who made a mail order purchase of a rifle with a coupon from the NRA magazine, 'American Rifleman.' Riots ensued the following year, and in 1966, America saw its first mass murder at the University of Texas. An attempt to regulate weapons ran into the gun lobby and the NRA. A majority of the country believed in gun reform, but the volume of letters and telegrams that members of Congress received were overwhelmingly from the gun supporters. The 1968 law that passed was labelled by the Washington Post as a "crimp in the mail order business." It was close to meaningless. Richard Nixon hated guns and thought that no American should own a handgun. His successors viewed matters differently. For Reagan, life was a struggle against the evils of communism, and whether you were an individual or a nation, it was essential to be armed to fight the evildoers.  He promoted a bill of rights for gun owners. In the 1990's, a bill banning assault rifles passed, but it had a sunset provision. After the Columbine slaughter, Tom DeLay said it was the result of a "godless society." The NRA achieved its greatest victory in 2008when the Supreme Court issued its verdict in Heller, which was a "substitution of the mythology of the gun culture for the truth of the Second Amendment." Antonin Scalia twisted and contorted English and American history to convert the concept of a collective militia into an individuals right to own weapons without government regulation. Thus, we all live in fear ofpersonal violence and our grandchildren practice "active shooter drills." This is an excellent read.