If you are interested in understanding the past, present, and future of guns in the United States, this list of key works offers a starting point for learning more about gun rights, gun culture, and gun control. Readers interested in a deeper dive should check back in the coming weeks for our “Gun Culture Syllabus.”
Primary Source
- Angela Y. Davis, excerpt from 1972 interview from California State Prison
Secondary Sources
- Jennifer Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic, 2014)
- Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights, 2018)
- Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (Basic, 2016)
- David Hemenway, Private Guns, Public Health: A Dramatic New Plan for Ending America’s Epidemic of Gun Violence (University of Michigan Press, 2004)
- Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Prometheus, 2014)
- Robert Spitzer, Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press, 2013)
- Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
- Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (Norton, 2011)
- Gary Younge, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (Nation Books, 2016)
