In the aftermath of the Parkland school shooting of February 14, 2018, scholar Danielle McGuire invited historians on Twitter to propose readings that would provide resources for gun control activists. In response, Public Books reached out to scholars Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston to develop a Gun Studies Syllabus.
There are an estimated 310 million firearms in the United States today—more than one gun per person—and while the US comprises about 5 percent of the world’s population, its inhabitants possess over 40 percent of the world’s guns. The US also experiences more gun deaths than any economically comparable nation: more than 38,600 in 2016, with nearly two-thirds of them suicides. How did the nation get here, and what is it doing to prevent gun violence? To answer these questions, this syllabus provides an interdisciplinary introduction to America’s unique “gun culture.”
Week 1
“To Keep and Bear”: An Introduction to Gun Culture in the United States
This week’s readings seek to demystify and question what is meant by “gun culture” and to introduce some popular databases by which gun ownership and gun violence have been tracked and studied in the contemporary US.
Secondary Readings
- Robert J. Spitzer, Guns Across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Joan Burbick, Gun Show Nation: Gun Culture and American Democracy (The New Press, 2006)
- Deborah Azrael et al., The Stock and Flow of U.S. Firearms: Results from the 2015 National Firearms Survey, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, vol. 3, no. 5 (2017)
- Harel Shapira, “The Big Picture: Gun Culture,” Public Books, November 17, 2017
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- Gun Violence Archive
- Small Arms Survey
- Kim Parker et al., “The Demographics of Gun Ownership,” Pew Research Center, June 22, 2017
Week 2
“A Well-Regulated Militia”: Legal Foundations of “Gun Rights”
The week’s readings address the nation’s unique legal foundations, particularly the Second Amendment to the US Constitution, in which a right to “have and bear arms” was articulated, while exploring some of the transitions and exclusionary frames through which “Second Amendment Rights” have taken shape over time.
Secondary Readings
- Michael Waldman, The Second Amendment: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
- Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the Origins of Gun Control in America (Oxford University Press, 2008)
- Patrick J. Charles, Armed in America: A History of Gun Rights from Colonial Militias to Concealed Carry (Prometheus, 2018)
- Adam Winkler, Gunfight: The Battle over the Right to Bear Arms in America (Norton, 2011)
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- “The Federalist Papers: No. 29,” January 10, 1788 (Hamilton); and “The Federalist Papers: No. 46,” January 29, 1788 (Madison)
- Proposed Amendments to the Constitution, June 8, 1789, Annals of Congress, House of Representatives, 1st Congress, 1st Session, p. 451
- Majority opinions in Dred Scott v. Sandford (1856), United States v. Cruikshank (1875), and District of Columbia v. Heller (2008)
- Militia Act of 1903 (stipulated the conditions for the federalization of the National Guard)
- Repository of Historical Gun Laws, Duke Law
- “The Gun Show,” More Perfect, podcast episode, October 11, 2017
- Timeline: Mass Shootings and Gun Control Legislation, USA Today
Week 3
“To Secure These Freedoms”: Colonization, Slave Patrols, and Early Police Forces
How has firearm ownership and use been protected—or not—via the Second Amendment? Which populations have been excluded from the right to have and bear arms, and in the interest of which power structures?
Secondary Readings
- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Loaded: A Disarming History of the Second Amendment (City Lights, 2018)
- Nicholas Johnson, Negroes and the Gun: The Black Tradition of Arms (Prometheus, 2014)
- Saul Cornell and Eric M. Ruben, “The Slave-State Origins of Modern Gun Rights,” The Atlantic, September 30, 2015
- Olivia B. Waxman, “How the U.S. Got Its Police Force,” Time, May 18, 2017
- Angela R. Riley, “Indians and Guns,” Georgetown Law Journal, vol. 100 (June 2012)
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- “An Act Concerning Servants and Slaves” (Virginia, 1705)
- Mississippi Black Codes (1865)
- “Massacre at Wounded Knee, 1890,” EyeWitness to History (1998)
Week 4
How the West Was Won: Guns and the Cowboy Mythos
How was the West “won,” and what kinds of violence do our nation’s “Wild West” mythologies obfuscate or silence? This week’s readings unpack and critique traditional notions of the heroic armed “cowboy” whose pluck and determination supposedly tamed a “wild” frontier.
Secondary Readings
- Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (University of Oklahoma Press, 1992)
- Adam Winkler, “Did the Wild West Have More Gun Control Than We Do Today?” HuffPost, September 9, 2011
- Caroline Light, “Mass Killing in Popular (Mis)Memory,” Beacon Broadside, June 16, 2016
- Karen Jones, “How the Wild West Was Spun,” HistoryExtra, July 23, 2014
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- Tombstone, Arizona Territory’s Ordinance No. 9: “To Provide Against Carrying of Deadly Weapons” (1881)
- High Noon (1952), film trailer
- The Lone Ranger (1956), film trailer
Week 5
“This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed”: Civil Rights and Armed Resistance
Although today historians tend to celebrate the Civil Rights Movement as an example of nonviolent resistance, in the 1960s and 1970s many activists advocated armed self-reliance to oppose white supremacist violence. This week’s readings illuminate what happened when African Americans mobilized their Second Amendment rights to defend communal safety and claim the privileges and protections of full citizenship.
Secondary Readings
- Charles E. Cobb Jr., This Nonviolent Stuff’ll Get You Killed: How Guns Made the Civil Rights Movement Possible (Basic, 2014)
- Akinyele Omowale Umoja, We Will Shoot Back: Armed Resistance in the Mississippi Freedom Movement (NYU Press, 2013)
- Lindsay Adamson Livingston, “Picking Up the Gun: Spectacular Performances of Firearm Ownership in the Long Civil Rights Movement,” in Performance in a Militarized Culture, edited by Sara Brady and Lindsey Mantoan (Routledge, 2017)
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- Robert F. Williams, “Can Negroes Afford to Be Pacifists?” New Left Review, vol. 1, no. 1 (1960)
- Huey P. Newton, To Die for the People: The Writings of Huey P. Newton (1972; City Lights, 2009)
- Angela Y. Davis, excerpt from 1972 interview from California State Prison
- David Cecelski “Oral History Interview with Mabel Williams,” August 20, 1999, Documenting the American South
- Kathleen Cleaver, Mabel Williams, and Angela Y. Davis, “Self Respect, Self Defense, & Self Determination,” video of March 14, 2004, event at First Congregational Church in Oakland, CA
- Condoleezza Rice on The View, March 1, 2018
Week 6
“Not Without a Fight”: Community Defense and Survival
To what extent is lethal self-defense experienced as a universal right in the contemporary US? How do people who are subject to multiple, overlapping exclusionary regimes protect themselves from violence? How do our nation’s legal structures protect the rights of minoritized individuals to “stand their ground” when they feel threatened?
Secondary Readings
- Caroline Light, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon, 2017)
- Breanna Edwards, “Not Without a Fight: Black Women Are Taking Up Arms to Protect Themselves,” The Root, May 27, 2017
- Laura Browder, Her Best Shot: Women and Guns in America (University of North Carolina Press, 2006)
- Chad Kautzer, “A Political Philosophy of Self-Defense,” Boston Review, February 1, 2018
- Michael Hill, “In Response to Far Right, LGBTQ Gun Group Hits Firing Line,” Associated Press, October 23, 2017
- s. e. smith, “The Trans Women Turning to Firearms for Survival,” Pacific Standard, January 3, 2018
Primary Readings/Multimedia
- scott crow, “We Refuse to Die: An Interview with Dennis Banks,” in Setting Sights: Histories and Reflections on Community Armed Self-Defense, edited by scott crow (PM, 2018)
- A Good Day to Die (2012), film trailer
- Bethany Mandel, “I Wanted to Be a Good Mom. So I Got a Gun.” New York Times, March 5, 2018
Week 7
“We Don’t Call 911”: Performing Armed Citizenship
This week’s readings explore the complex performances of “armed citizenship” through which Americans take control of their own safety in what they perceive to be an increasingly dangerous world. Based on what kinds of criminal threats are these subjectivities taking shape? And what happens when armed “law-abiding” citizens misidentify other citizens as threats?
Secondary Readings
- Jennifer D. Carlson, Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline (Oxford University Press, 2015)
- Dan Baum, “Happiness Is a Worn Gun,” Harper’s (August 2010)
- Dave Grossman, with Loren Christensen, “On Sheep, Wolves, and Sheepdogs,” from On Combat: The Psychology and Physiology of Deadly Conflict in War and in Peace, 3rd ed. (Warrior Science, 2008)
- Patricia Williams, “The ‘Ground’ in ‘Stand Your Ground’ Means Any Place a White Person Is Nervous,” The Nation, August 15, 2016
Primary Readings/Multimedia
- NRA, Refuse to Be a Victim
- Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law
- “Florida ‘Stand Your Ground’ Law Cases,” Tampa Bay Times
Week 8
“Good Guys with Guns?”: Armed White Masculinity
Wayne LaPierre of the NRA famously claimed that the only thing that stops a “bad guy with a gun” is a “good guy with a gun.” What are the race and class assumptions embedded in this logic of vulnerability and threat? How do these assumptions draw on genealogies of white supremacy? When everyone is armed and ready to kill, how does one discern the “good guys” from the “bad?”
Secondary Readings
- Robert Churchill, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant’s Face: Libertarian Political Violence and the Origins of the Militia Movement (University of Michigan Press, 2011)
- Jeremy Adam Smith, “Why Are White Men Stockpiling Guns?,” Scientific American, March 14, 2018
- Kerry O’Brien et al., “Racism, Gun Ownership and Gun Control: Biased Attitudes in US Whites May Influence Policy Decisions,” Plos One, October 31, 2013
- Angela Stroud, Good Guys with Guns: The Appeal and Consequences of Concealed Carry (University of North Carolina Press, 2015)
- Southern Poverty Law Center, “Oath Keepers” profile
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- NRA, “Freedom’s Safest Place”
- “What Is the Three Percenters?,” Thethreepercenters.org
- “About Oath Keepers,” Oathkeepers.org
Week 9
“What a Bullet Can Do”: Public Health and Gun Policy
How does gun ownership affect public safety and health? Even as firearms outnumber people, and as more civilians acquire military-grade weaponry capable of mass killing, policy-makers and elected officials have resisted addressing gun violence as a public health issue. What are the legacies of the Dickey Amendment’s limitation on federal funding for scientific research on gun violence?
Secondary Readings
- David Hemenway, Private Guns, Public Health (University of Michigan Press, 2004)
- Andrew Conner, Deborah Azrael, and Matthew Miller, “Public Opinion about the Relationship between Firearm Availability and Suicide: Results from a National Survey,” Annals of Internal Medicine, January 16, 2018
- Sarah Zhang, “Why Can’t the US Treat Gun Violence as a Public Health Problem?,” The Atlantic, February 15, 2018
- David Hemenway and Matthew Miller, “Public Health Approach to the Prevention of Gun Violence,” New England Journal of Medicine, May 23, 2013
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- Jason Fagone, “What Bullets Do to Bodies,” Highline, April 26, 2017
- Sue Repko, What a Bullet Can Do,” Hazlitt, March 7, 2018
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Firearm Mortality by State”
Week 10
“False Promises?”: Sex, Violence, and Firearms
“Gun rights” lobbyists argue that guns will prevent rapes and other violent attacks on women, but evidence shows that the presence of guns in a home actually undermines women’s safety. Furthermore, women are more likely to be attacked or killed by their own intimate partners than by criminal strangers. What are the political, racial, and gender-related implications of the NRA’s appeal to armed womanhood? Who is left out of the “armed and fabulous” narrative, and how is the threat of gendered violence articulated within that narrative?
Secondary Readings
- Jennifer Carlson, “From Gun Politics to Self-Defense Politics: A Feminist Critique of the Great Gun Debate,” Violence Against Women, vol. 20, no. 3 (2014)
- Kerry Shaw, “12 Facts That Show How Guns Make Domestic Violence Even Deadlier,” The Trace, August, 22, 2016
- Katie McDonough, “‘Where There Are More Guns, More Women Die’: A Harvard Public Health Expert Breaks Down the Data on Firearms and Women’s Safety,” interview with Deborah Azrael, Salon, February 24, 2015
- Alan Schwarz, “A Bid for Guns on Campuses to Deter Rape,” New York Times, February 18, 2015
- Caroline Light, “The False Promise That ‘Armed Citizenship’ Will Keep Women Safe,” The Trace, February 14, 2017
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- Nikki Craft, “Drifting from the Mainstream: A Chronicle of Early Anti-Rape Organizing” (1979)
- NRA’s Armed & Fabulous, “A Survivor’s Spirit • The Toni Moceri Story” (2017)
- Dana Loesch, “Freedom’s Safest Place | Real Empowerment,” NRA (2016)
- Students for Concealed Carry on Campus
- Cocks Not Glocks
Week 11
Merchants of Death: Marketing and Selling Guns
How did firearms become a household commodity, and how has their marketing changed over time? This week’s readings address the ways manufacturers have framed their advertising to reflect different, often gendered and raced, assumptions about gun ownership and use.
Secondary Readings
- Tom Diaz, Making a Killing: The Business of Guns in America (The New Press, 1999)
- Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture (Basic, 2016)
- Scott Melzer, Gun Crusaders: The NRA’s Culture War (NYU Press, 2009)
- Elizabeth Blair and Eva M. Hyatt, “The Marketing of Guns to Women: Factors Influencing Gun-Related Attitudes and Gun Ownership by Women,” Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, vol. 14, no. 1 (Spring 1995)
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- David Matthews, “How Gun Advertising in America Has Changed Since the 1950s,” Splinter, October 8, 2015
- United States Department of Justice, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, “Firearms Commerce in the United States: Annual Statistical Update” (2017)
- Howard Chua-Eoan, “Chicks With Guns,” Time, November 13, 2011
Week 12
“Another Day in the Death of America”: The Militarization of Everyday Life
What are the cultural and political consequences of unfettered “gun rights,” and how do police and civilians alike become complicit in a militarized culture? This week’s readings address the recent proliferation of firearms in public spaces and their impact on vulnerable populations.
Secondary Readings
- Franklin E. Zimring, When Police Kill (Harvard University Press, 2017)
- Donna Murch, “Ferguson’s Inheritance,” Jacobin, August 5, 2015
- David Perry, “Police Killings: The Price of Being Disabled and Black in America,” The Guardian, June 22, 2017
- Thomas Gabor, Confronting Gun Violence in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016)
- Gary Younge, Another Day in the Death of America: A Chronicle of Ten Short Lives (Nation Books, 2016)
- Firmin Debrabander, “How Guns Could Censor College Classrooms,” The Atlantic, March 4, 2016
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- NORC, “General Social Survey: Trends in Gun Ownership in the United States, 1972–2014”
- Mapping Police Violence
- “The Counted: People Killed by Police in the US,” The Guardian (2015–16)
Week 13
“Battleground America”: Framing Contemporary Debates
We end with a section on contemporary debates over “gun rights” and a look at nascent student-driven movements for commonsense gun regulations. What kinds of policies have leaders suggested for curtailing mass killings, and what kinds of solutions are proposed at the grassroots level?
Secondary Readings
- Philip J. Cook and Kristin A. Goss, The Gun Debate: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Garry Wills, “Our Moloch,” New York Review of Books, December 15, 2012
- Jill Lepore, “Battleground America,” New Yorker, April 23, 2012
- Petula Dvorak, “The Nation Is Focused on Students and Gun Violence. But Kids in Urban Schools Want to Know, Where’s Everybody Been?,” Washington Post, March 12, 2018
- Nate Cohn and Kevin Quealy, “Nothing Divides Voters Like Owning a Gun,” New York Times, October 5, 2017
- David Frum, “The Chilling Effects of Openly Displayed Firearms,” The Atlantic, August 16, 2017
Primary Sources and Multimedia
- John Wagner and Jenna Johnson, “‘We Have to Harden Our Schools’: Trump Makes Arming Teachers His Top Safety Goal,” Washington Post, February 22, 2018
- David French, “What Critics Don’t Understand about Gun Culture,” The Atlantic, February 27, 2018
- CNN town hall in wake of Florida school shooting, February 21, 2018
For their help in developing the syllabus, the authors wish to thank Deborah Azrael, Laura Browder, Matt Miller, and Joey Wertz.
This article was commissioned by Sharon Marcus. 
