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"This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's fathers did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms-and that this intentional distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. Hundreds of lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers-it is also the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its Founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns-as we parse legislation on background checks and automatic weapons bans, we fail to ask: Do individual gun rights have any place at all in American democracy? Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the Founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings-the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the enduring republic they hoped to build. They baked these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed as bedrock by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet: the twin scourges of America's sickness on race and its near-religious nationalism would work in tandem to create an alternate, darker vision of American freedom. This vision was defined by a mystic conception of good guys and bad guys, underpinned by a host of assumptions about innocence and guilt, power and entitlement. By the time the US Supreme Court essentially invented an individual gun right in 2008 by torturing the words of the Second Amendment in Heller-a decision that Erdozain convincingly eviscerates-many Americans had already acceded to gun activists' perverse unfreedom. To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the Founders' true idea of what it means to be free"--… (meer)
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Depressing but passionate narrative about how the Supreme Court, and Republicans in general, got it so wrong. The Founders, he argues, had a very clear conception of the militia and of states’ rights to decide who would be armed; but as the militia became outdated, it was possible to reframe the Second Amendment as a personal guarantee, despite the ahistoricity of that concept. He frames a key culprit as being the myth of the innocent gun owner/the myth that there are good guys and bad guys and never the twain shall meet, when—among other things—carrying a gun makes people get in more fights, even aside from the racism that means that the freedom to carry a gun is a white person’s freedom. Thinking of oneself as a morally pure innocent contributes to a willingness to kill when feeling threatened. Not that the racism isn’t also key: Erdozain recounts how William Faulkner—who called himself a critic of segregation—said that if the federal government forced integration, he'd take up arms against it “even if it meant going out on the street and shooting Negroes. After all, I’m not going out to shoot Mississippians.” ( )
Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
"But don't you see, this is just the point - what has for centuries raised man above the beast is not the cudgel but an inward music: the irresistible power of unarmed truth, the powerful attraction of its example...."
"I haven't understood a word. You should write a book about it." -Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago
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Informatie afkomstig uit de Engelse Algemene Kennis.Bewerk om naar jouw taal over te brengen.
In the first five years that I lived in America, four of the deadliest shootings in the nation's history took place - at a school, a nightclub, a concert, a church. -Prologue, "You're Next"
Richard Venola was a pillar of the gun culture - a retired US Marine who wrote a fiery column for Guns & Ammo magazine, having previously served as editor. Venola was a vivid and engaging writer, expert at drawing the reader into the zip and terror of a shoot. He loved to dispel stereotypes about the bitter, clinging types" of the gun community, tirelessly asserting the claims of the gun owners as "a person of substance and responsibility." -Chapter 1, The Myth of the Law-Abiding Citizen
"This takedown of American gun culture argues that the nation's fathers did not intend the Second Amendment to guarantee an individual right to bear arms-and that this intentional distortion of the record is an urgent threat to democracy. Hundreds of lives are lost to firearms every day in America. The cost is more than the numbers-it is also the fear, the anxiety, the dread of public spaces that an armed society has created under the tortured rubric of freedom. But the norms of today are not the norms of American history or the values of its Founders. They are the product of a gun culture that has imposed its vision on a sleeping nation. Historian Dominic Erdozain argues that we have wrongly ceded the big-picture argument on guns-as we parse legislation on background checks and automatic weapons bans, we fail to ask: Do individual gun rights have any place at all in American democracy? Taking readers on a brilliant historical journey, Erdozain shows how the Founders feared the tyranny of individuals as much as the tyranny of kings-the idea that any person had a right to walk around armed was anathema to their notion of freedom and the enduring republic they hoped to build. They baked these ideas into the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, ideas that were subsequently affirmed as bedrock by two centuries of jurisprudence. And yet: the twin scourges of America's sickness on race and its near-religious nationalism would work in tandem to create an alternate, darker vision of American freedom. This vision was defined by a mystic conception of good guys and bad guys, underpinned by a host of assumptions about innocence and guilt, power and entitlement. By the time the US Supreme Court essentially invented an individual gun right in 2008 by torturing the words of the Second Amendment in Heller-a decision that Erdozain convincingly eviscerates-many Americans had already acceded to gun activists' perverse unfreedom. To save our democracy, he argues, we must fight for the Founders' true idea of what it means to be free"--
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