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Tom Diaz's "The Last Gun" was first published in hardcover shortly
after the tragic Newtown massacre. Major media outlets, including
the "New York Times," "Rolling Stone," "Democracy Now," NPR, and
CNBC, rushed to contact Diaz, the widely respected gun control
advocate, for his views on what Americans could do to bring an end
to this epidemic of gun violence. As he told them, America is by
far the most armed nation in the world, and it has the deaths to
show for it: by some estimates, over 30,000 in 2013 alone. In this
"readable and topical" ("Bloomberg Businessweek") book, the former
gun enthusiast and ex-member of the National Rifle Association lays
out a lucid, incisive account of how we got here and what we can do
to prevent future massacres.
Marshaling a range of stunning evidence and case studies, "The Last
Gun" is essential reading for understanding how we can finally rid
America's streets, schools, and homes of gun violence--and with
effective gun control measures stalled in Congress, it remains as
timely as ever.
Humans are a species that classifies. We arrange the flow of the
things and events that we see and experience, place them into
categories, and erect boundaries around those categories. Among the
boundaries that we erect are those that we put around groups of
"other" human beings. The evil side of human classification of
other human beings is that we sometimes create false categories of
other people, as is often the case in racial, ethnic, and religious
stereotypes. This unmindful creation of empty categories of human
characteristics is what happened during two periods crucial to the
construction of race in America. This is racism. The United States
is in a period of deep cultural flux and conflict, much of it seen
through the lens of race. This book proposes that the everyday
actions of ordinary people, in the context of extreme political and
cultural polarization, distort the criminal justice system and
betray the lofty ideals expressed in American founding documents
and centuries of Anglo-American articulations of basic human
rights. These everyday actions range across a spectrum from the
armed intervention of private citizens in the forms of individual
action, neighborhood watches, and citizen's arrests, to the
expectations imposed on law enforcement, in particular, and the
criminal justice system in general.
Tragedy in Aurora is about the 2012 murder of budding sports
journalist Jessica (Jessi) Redfield Ghawi in a public mass
shooting, and the widening circle of pain it inflicted on her
family, friends, police, medical first responders, and others. The
book is at the same time a deep examination of the causes and
potential cures of the quintessential 21st century American
sickness-public mass shootings. At the heart of that examination is
an unpacking of America's deep polarization and political gridlock.
It addresses head on the question of why? Why is American gun
violence so different from other countries? Why does nothing seem
to change? The "Parkland kids" inspired hope of change. But the
ultimate questions stubbornly remain-what should, what can, and
what will Americans do to reduce gun violence? Tragedy in Aurora
argues that the answer lies in a conscious cultural redefinition of
American civic order. Over recent decades, America has defined a
cultural "new normal" about guns and gun violence. Americans
express formalistic dismay after every public mass shooting. But
many accept gun violence as an inevitable, even necessary, and to
some laudable part of what it means to be "American." Although
Americans claim to be shocked with each new outrage, so far they
have failed to coalesce around an effective way to reduce gun death
and injury. The debate is bogged down in polarized and profoundly
ideological political and cultural argument. Meanwhile, America
continues to lead the globe in its pandemic levels of gun deaths
and injuries. Combined with the cynical "learned helplessness" of
its politicians, the result is gridlock and a growing roll of
victims of carnage. Is there a path out of this cultural and
political gridlock? Tragedy in Aurora argues that if America is to
reduce gun violence it must expand the debate and confront the
fundamental question of "who are we?" Tom Diaz gives a new
understanding of American culture and the potential for change
offered by the growing number and ongoing organization of victims
and survivors of gun violence. Without conscious cultural change,
the book argues, there is little prospect of effective laws or
public policy to reduce gun violence in general and public mass
shootings in particular.
The gun industry is the last unregulated manufacturer of a consumer
product in America. This book argues that the rise in gun violence
is due to increased lethality. It shows how, since the 1970s, the
gun industry has fought declining profits by increasing the killing
power of its weapons.
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