Our Romance With Guns

September 27, 2012

David Cole

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Gunfight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America
by Adam Winkler
Norton, 361 pp., $27.95                                                  

The City That Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control
by Franklin E. Zimring
Oxford University Press, 257 pp., $29.95                                                  

Don’t Shoot: One Man, a Street Fellowship, and the End of Violence in Inner-City America
by David M. Kennedy
Bloomsbury, 305 pp., $28.00                                                  

Every single day in this country, more than thirty people are killed by guns. Few of these everyday victims generate national headlines; indeed, gun homicide is so routine that many do not even warrant a local news story. But it is the decidedly nonglamorous, quotidian infliction of death and serious injury by gun owners that deserves our focused and sustained attention. And politicians’ cowardice in the face of the NRA is not the only obstacle to meaningful reform; an even greater hurdle lies in the fact that we seem willing to accept an intolerable situation as long as the victims are, for the most part, young black and Hispanic men.

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Guns: Let's Learn from the UK October 25, 2012

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