Academic Writing Group Projects

"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?

In the United States more than thirty thousand deaths each year can be attributed to firearms. This book on the history of guns in America examines the Second Amendment and the laws and court cases it has spawned. The author's thorough and objective account shows the complexities of the issue, which are so often reduced to bumper-sticker slogans, and suggests ways in which gun violence in this country can be reduced. Briggs profiles not only protagonists in the national gun debate but also ordinary people, showing the ways guns have become part of the lives of many Americans. Among them are gays and lesbians, women, competitive trapshooters, people in the gun-rights and gun-control trenches, the NRA's first female president, and the most successful gunsmith in American history. Balanced and painstakingly unbiased, Briggs's account provides the background needed to follow gun politics in America and to understand the gun culture in which we are likely to live for the foreseeable future.

The gun-toting woman holds enormous symbolic significance in American culture. For over two centuries, women who pick up guns have disrupted the popular association of guns and masculinity, spurring debates about women's capabilities for violence as well as their capacity for full citizenship. In Her Best Shot, Laura Browder examines the relationship between women and guns and the ways in which the figure of the armed woman has served as a lightning rod for cultural issues. Utilizing autobiographies, advertising, journalism, novels, and political tracts, among other sources, Browder traces appearances of the armed woman across a chronological spectrum from the American Revolution to the present and an ideological spectrum ranging from the Black Panthers to right-wing militias. Among the colorful characters presented here are Deborah Sampson, who disguised herself as a man to fight in the American Revolution; Pauline Cushman, who posed as a Confederate to spy for Union forces during the Civil War; Wild West sure-shot Annie Oakley; African explorer Osa Johnson; 1930s gangsters Ma Barker and Bonnie Parker; and Patty Hearst, the hostage-turned-revolutionary-turned-victim. With her entertaining and provocative analysis, Browder demonstrates that armed women both challenge and reinforce the easy equation that links guns, manhood, and American identity.

Gun ownership is as old as the nation, but, as Robert J. Spitzer demonstrates in Guns across America, so is gun regulation. In vast swathes of America, the sanctity of the Second Amendment has become a political third rail, never to be questioned, yet by employing new research on early gun laws, Spitzer reveals that firearms were in fact more strictly regulated in the country's first three centuries than in recent years.