One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy By Dominic Erdozain

This critique of American gun culture contends that the Second Amendment was not intended to protect a person's right to keep and bear guns, and that this misrepresentation of history poses a serious danger to democracy.

"One Nation Under Guns is that rare book that can help change the way we live in this countryit's both eye-opening and enraging at the same time."Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author of the best-selling book Start Again

Every day in America, weapons claim the lives of over a hundred people. Beyond the numbers, the price lies in the worry, terror, and dread of public places that an armed society has instilled under the perverted banner of freedom. However, neither the founding fathers' ideals nor the conventions of today are the same as those of American history. They are the offspring of a gun culture that has forced its beliefs onto a country that is fast asleep.

Dominic Erdozain, a historian, contends that we have mistakenly given up the larger debate over guns: We neglect to consider what role firearms should play in a healthy democracy when we analyze laws pertaining to background checks and the prohibition of automatic weapons. The concept that anybody had the right to carry a weapon was incompatible with the founders' vision of freedom and the peaceful republic they intended to establish. Erdozain takes readers on a fascinating historical trip to demonstrate how the founders dreaded the tyranny of people as much as the tyranny of monarchs. These concepts were later upheld by two centuries of legal precedent and included in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

However, the combined evils of nationalism and racism would give rise to a more sinister conception of Americaone of a reckless and renegade freedom founded only on bloodline. This freedomrather than the liberty guaranteed by the Constitutionis what gave rise to the myths about good and evil, innocence, and guilt that characterize our contemporary gun culture. Many Americans had already given in to the fantasy of the unfreedom of an armed society by the time the U.S. Supreme Court reinterpreted the Second Amendment in the 2008 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, which Erdozain persuasively dismantles. He contends that in order to preserve our democracy, we must defend the original meaning of freedom as defined by the founders.

Dettagli