Journalist – Historian – Speaker
Yesterday, a gunman using an AR-15 style rifle killed 10 people in a Boulder, CO, grocery store. It was the 7th mass shooting in the U.S. in the last 7 days. Over the years, I’ve written a lot about guns. It started with some high profile attacks on college campuses, when editors turned to me …
Guns kill more people than cars for the first time since the CDC began tracking causes of death for Americans. Why? Cars have been regulated for safety, companies have invested in safety, individuals have been legally required to be safe, and both individuals and companies are legally liable. Guns … not so much. Thanks NRA!
I went on Fox Business and got yelled at a bunch, as expected. It was an interesting experience to be shouted at about demonizing “objects” by folks who treat those objects as if they were the golden calf. I’m not sure the conversation in such a format is useful. I’m also such a visual person …
I like incrementalism, but the NRA has made it impossible. Even the massacre of children, churchgoers, country music fans, and teenagers, hasn’t helped. So let’s change the context. I wrote against the Second Amendment for Pacific Standard: When I say “repeal the Second Amendment,” I am not saying that we should criminalize all private ownership …
In case you missed it, the correlation between mental illness and violence towards others is not in evidence. The belief that the mentally ill are more likely to take part in a mass shooting appears to be a misleading. There were 198,760 homicides committed by a firearm in the United States between 1999 and 2015, …
In my latest for The Nation, I zoom in on a little clause in Trump’s latest comments on mental health and gun violence. Trump’s comments on mental health are typical of Republican response to violence. He characterized the killer as a “very deranged individual” who has a “mental health problem at the highest level.” This …
On Friday afternoon, one of Playboy’s editors asked me to write about the gun violence and policing we’d seen over the past few days. My piece is here (Warning – it’s Playboy, so while there’s no nudity, there’s plenty of reference to sex on the site): In the piece, I tried to lay out some of …
Throughout the day yesterday, as people on social media mourned the death of Philando Castile and expressed their outrage at his killer, I saw one constant thread: People pointing out the hypocrisy of the NRA. Numerous articles appeared talking about the ways in which the NRA’s call for the broadest view of the 2nd Amendment doesn’t seem to apply …
Thesis: The idea that your students have guns will have a vastly more chilling effect on academic freedom than people asking for trigger warnings, less offensive language, or to be thoughtful about microaggressions. Coming soon from CNN. (Update for new readers. Hi new readers! Here are some of my writing about Trigger Warnings and PC …
I’ll have a piece later today from CNN on the shooting in San Bernardino, CA. I’ve written about gun violence for them before. I’m sitting in a small square room, cluttered with books and papers, at the end of a short dead-end corridor. I’m a history professor at a small university, sitting in my office …