For the next few weeks, Literary Hub will be going beyond the memes for an in-depth look at the everyday issues affecting Americans as they head to the polls on November 5th. Each week at Lit Hub we’ll be featuring reading lists, essays, and interviews on important topics like Income Inequality, Climate Justice, LGBTQ Rights, Reproductive Rights, and more. For a better handle on the issues affecting you and your loved ones—regardless of who ends up president on November 6th (or 7th, or 8th, or whenever)—stay tuned to LitHub.com in October. Read parts one, two, and three, on Income Inequality, The Importance of Labor, and The High Costs of a For-Profit Healthcare System.
Today we’ve gathered the best stories published at Lit Hub about a very important issue affecting Americans: the daily scourge of gun violence.
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Their Cold, Dead Hands: Is the Only Solution to America’s Gun Problem at the Local Level?
Questioned in 2002 about her greatest accomplishment, former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher famously answered “Tony Blair and the New Labour. We forced our opponents to change their minds.”
One wonders if Wayne LaPierre—who finally stepped down this year as CEO and executive president of the National Rifle Association, a position he had held since 1991—might not have had a similar moment of satisfaction watching Vice President Harris’s recent discussion with Oprah Winfrey, in which the Democratic nominee for president proudly identified as a gun owner and laughingly proclaimed that, “If somebody breaks into my house, they’re getting shot.”
Harris’s media blitz celebrating her ownership of a Glock handgun and LaPierre’s defenestration from the NRA are indicative of the broader shifts that have transformed the landscape of US gun culture over the course of the 21st century.
10 Best Books on Guns in America
The gun has come to embody many contradictions over America’s history: individual liberty and the police state, empowerment and violence, defense and death. To understand America’s complicated culture of guns is an interdisciplinary pursuit: legal, historical, sociological, economic. The following books are all exemplary attempts at that understanding.
One might begin at the Second Amendment, with its disputed meaning and the intentions of the Framers, the inextricable way in which gun rights sought to preserve existing systems of oppression and power, namely slavery, and that still today arguments around guns are inherently racialized. Guns, too, have always been a commodity, and in many ways, the gun industry created gun culture as we know it. One third of adult Americans own a gun. The NRA wields unfathomable political power. And every single day, at the hands of our own inventions, one hundred Americans die, seven of whom are children.
Paul Auster: Why Is America the Most Violent Country in the Western World?
In 1970, I began a six-month stint in the merchant marine, employed as an ordinary seaman on an Esso oil tanker, and it was aboard that ship that I first came into contact with men who had grown up around guns and continued to live on intimate terms with them. For the most part, our cargo consisted of jet fuel, which we hauled up and down the Atlantic coast and into the Gulf of Mexico. Elizabeth, New Jersey, and Baytown, Texas, the sites of two of Esso’s largest refineries, were the end points of all our journeys, with customary stops in Tampa and other ports along the way.
There were just thirty-three men on board, and apart from a couple of Europeans and a handful of Northerners like myself, every officer and member of the crew came from the South, nearly all of them from Louisiana and various towns along the Texas coast. Two of those shipmates jump back into my thoughts now, not because they were especially close friends of mine but because each of them, in his own vastly different way, was instrumental in furthering my education about guns.
After Apalachee: How America’s Gun Violence Epidemic Affects Us All
Wednesday, September 4th, I was in my home office in Athens, Georgia. I was working on a piece about attending a memorial for Emmett Till in the Mississippi Delta, where I’m from, where I was attempting to address what it meant to be from a region scarred by white male violence. I was trying to make myself break for lunch, when I received a text from my husband, a high school engineering and robotics instructor. “Shooting at Apalachee High. No word but one teacher may be shot. Suspect in custody.”
My stomach dropped. Apalachee High was only 26 miles away. I texted my husband and asked if he was okay. I’m a former public school librarian—I knew what it was like, hearing about a school shooting, while being trapped in a classroom. He told me yes. I sent him a heart emoji, and watched the three dots, waiting.
More Guns, More Money: How America Turned Weapons Into a Consumer Commodity
Like all mythological subjects, the gun country has many origin stories. Some of them start in seventeenth-century British law or eighteenth-century colonial North America. Others begin with the nineteenth-century founding and expansion of industrial production. They trace a path through such places as the “Gun Valley” of Massachusetts and Connecticut, where much of the traditional gun industry originated, and track the rise and fall of fortunes belonging to the likes of Samuel Colt or Oliver Winchester.
Others still look to the gun violence of the twentieth century in places like Chicago, Detroit, or New York, cities decimated by the “urban crisis” of midcentury America. Rarely does an origin story for the gun country begin 4,000 miles away, in Helsinki, Finland. But that’s where this one for postwar American gun capitalism takes us, to where the Finnish government, like its counterparts throughout Europe in the years after the Second World War, grappled for a solution to a gun problem of its own.
When Threats of Violence Come to University Libraries
On the morning of July 11, several employees of Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, PA received an emailed bomb threat from someone unaffiliated with the university, specifically naming the university’s library and dining commons. It might be called a typical bomb threat in which no bomb was found: local police and FBI evacuated students and staff from the library and summer campers from the dining hall before moving the rest of the campus to safe sites. Law enforcement determined the threat was not credible, and the university lifted the evacuation order later that day. It was disruptive, but not violent.
What followed over the next two weeks, though, was unusual. Four days later, and two days after the assassination attempt on Donald Trump, a university library six hundred miles away received a similar threat. This one came hours after Bellarmine University in Louisville, KY announced the suspension of Professor John James for an “offensive and unacceptable” social media post sharing a screenshotted article about the Trump shooting with the words “If you’re gonna shoot, man, don’t miss.”
Modern Gun Ownership is Just Another Consumer Fantasy About Empowerment
One of the first things we knew about Thomas Matthew Crooks, the would-be assassin of Donald Trump, was that he was killed wearing a “Demolition Ranch” t-shirt. Demolition Ranch is a YouTube channel (and associated merchandise brand) owned and operated by Texas veterinarian Mathew Carriker. In its 13 years of existence, Demolition Ranch has produced thousands of hours of content, some instructional but most gleefully adolescent, featuring Carriker and his friends using often outlandish firearms to destroy everything from ballistic dummies to derelict cars. It has over eleven million followers.
Two days after the assassination attempt, Carriker posted an emotional video offering condolences to the victims and distancing himself from the shooter. “Across all of my videos, we don’t talk about politics at all,” Carrick assures those tuning in for the first time. “This channel is not about violence, this channel never will be.”
Ben Fountain Reports From the NRA’s National Convention, Surrounded by 11 Acres of Guns
At the 145th National Rifle Association annual convention you could see and purchase replica flintlock muskets like Daniel Boone’s, “wardrobe” handguns the size of a cell phone, a carriage-mounted 1883 Gatling gun, historic firearms from the Renaissance down through the latest surge, bullet-splat jewelry, deep-concealment holsters, triple-barrel shotguns, and camo everything—coolers, flasks, four-wheelers, deer blinds, lingerie, infant-wear.
There was a motorcycle with a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on the handlebar (sorry, not for sale), all manner of scopes, optics, and laser-sighting technologies (how do the animals stand a chance?), “shelf-stable” food products, bulk ammo, precision ammo, make-your-own-ammo ammo, historical exhibits, mom-and-pop purveyors of cleaning fluids and swabs, and corporate icons with slick, multilevel sales areas worthy of luxury car showrooms. And the flag, everywhere, all the time, the stars and stripes popping from pistol grips, knives, banners, T-shirts, shawls, bandannas, sunglasses, product brochures, and shopping bags. America, America, sweet land that we love. A photo spread for a well-known gun manufacturer featured a whiskery, camo-clad, Viagra-aged Caucasian male standing in ankle-deep marsh with a dog by his side, shotgun slung to his back, and a large U.S. flag in one hand, the pole planted in the muck, as if staking a claim.
This Is Not a Drill: How to Go Into Lockdown in a School Library
1.
Perch at the circulation desk, smiling like a happy librarian even though you haven’t had a lunch break. Tap out an interlibrary loan request into a system optimistically called WorldShare. Sneak bites of sticky edamame pasta and Impossible sausage, regretting a flirtation with veganism.
2.
Marvel at the sight of forty-five teenagers bent over books, utterly silent—maybe for the first time in their lives.
3.
Startle at the ding, ding, ding from the PA. “This is a lockdown.” The assistant principal’s Jamaican accent is tightening like a wire. “This is NOT a drill.”
Not-So-Good Guys with Guns: On the Origins of the NRA
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the public face of the National Rifle Association was the gun-loving hobbyist who collected, restored, lovingly oiled, and would not shut up about his beautiful guns. Multiply him by a couple of thousand, and you have a pretty clear picture of what the organization looked like at first. Rather than insisting that every man, woman, and child (yes, child!) should own a gun—as it would nearly a century later—the NRA of our great-great-grandparents wanted to make sure that people who owned guns knew how to use them.
The NRA was established in 1871 in the aftermath of the Civil War, when technological innovation—particularly breech-loading guns and metal cartridge ammunition—allowed shooters, for the very first time, to aim and actually hit a desired target. American men needed to be trained to use the new technology, and the founders, Colonel William C. Church and General George Wingate, set out to improve American marksmanship. They envisioned the National Guard running a get-better-at-shooting association but realized that private enterprise could support the effort more quickly.
