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This chapter traces the changing iconography of guns within an array of literary texts from the nineteenth century and cinematic texts of the twentieth century. This chapter outlines the shifting emphases within the Western; for though the gun has always been important to the Western, the genre’s representations of gun violence have varied through its history. This chapter argues that the Western's changing iconographic emphases, from aim to speed, codes violence morally upright and justifiable at different moments within the genre’s long history.

This chapter frames the discussion of the politics of firearms with an exploration of the gendered nature of domestic violence, firearm fatalities, and the firearms debate, including how women are portrayed and the gender identities of the most prominent voices for “gun rights” and gun control. Given the stark and brutal realities of firearms and family violence, politicians across the ideological spectrum should readily agree that people who violently attack or threaten family members should be subject to practical and measured restrictions on their access to firearms. Unfortunately, safety as related to firearms and family violence has become highly politicized. This chapter identifies measure that states can enact to address the loopholes that allow domestic abusers to acquire firearms even after they have been convicted of felony abuse, often to deadly effect.

This chapter discusses the solutions for gun violence. A variety of interventions hold promise for reducing misuse of guns, including traditional gun control measures, requiring gun manufacturers to incorporate safety features in their products, policing against illegal carrying, and threatening those who use guns in crime with longer prison sentences. The potential benefits of such interventions are compared with estimated costs. Since some of these interventions arguably produce benefits in excess of costs, increasing their scope or intensity improves the overall standard of living in America.

The paradigm of the armed and dangerous mass killer in public opinion and legislation is a homicidal-suicidal stranger hunting in public. Yet half of all firearms-related homicides take place in the home, typically among intimates and people known to the slain. Drawing on data from the National Violent Death Reporting System, this chapter shows that even in the context of extraordinary violence by the homicidal-suicidal, the major early red flags and risk factors involve seemingly ordinary smaller-scale assaults and domestic disturbances. Firearms laws prevent individuals convicted of crimes of domestic violence or under court-issued restraining orders from possessing firearms. The problem is that many perpetrators never come to the attention of a court. Based on these findings regarding what current legal screens miss, this chapter discusses how police discretion and scene-of the-assault procedure for “ordinary” domestic violence can help prevent escalation to the feared extraordinary violence of homicidal-suicidal mass killings.

This chapter examines the use of conventional weapons in war. It discusses the global gun supply, and examines how governments and nongovernmental organizations are working together to control proliferation and stop the misuse of firearms worldwide. It reviews the specific requirements for protecting civilians within the Geneva Convention IV.

This chapter reconsiders an issue at the beginning of the book: what is the problem for which gun control is the solution? Gun control only makes sense as a means toward reducing accidental and intentional deaths, injuries, and crimes. Most accidental and intentional injuries are not inflicted with guns, although most suicides and homicides are. This chapter argues that allowing for decentralized gun regulation according to local preference allows negative externalities. Some communities wishing to ban private possession of firearms in public places, for example, will find their ambition undermined by a neighboring community's policy of allowing liberal access to firearms. Violence has decreased dramatically in the last decade in the United States, despite the continued increase in the stock of civilian guns. This means that firearms accessibility is not the only thing, and not the most important thing, driving gun crime.

This chapter examines the Million Mom March in May 2000, when for the first time American mothers took aim at gun violence and gun control. The event marked the first coalition between suburban, mostly white mothers and urban mothers mostly of color. The Million Mom March allowed mothers to transform the maternal experience into political work and to reconceptualize their unpaid, often devalued labor. However, their public display of grief also evoked fear and disgust—fear that this maternalist movement would succeed in eliminating guns, a literal and figurative symbol of American masculinity; and disgust at the sentimentality that threatened to supplant masculine strength with feminine weakness.

This chapter discusses the Littleton tragedy and evaluates several lessons that are important for addressing the problem of gun violence in America. It also explains the benefits of reducing gun violence. It then examines the gun policy, as well as the importance of the law-enforcement activities in reducing criminal gun misuse. It notes that there are a variety of programs to reduce gun violence that enjoy widespread popular support. However, they have little effect on the ability of most private citizens to keep guns for personal use, and have benefits that exceed costs.

This concluding chapter examines the relationship between the increasing codification of aggressive “Stand Your Ground” laws since 2005 and the continued relevance of the Western as a popular genre. This final chapter presents a reading of two contemporary Westerns, the television series Justified (2010-15) and Quentin Tarrantino's film, Django Unchained (2012), arguing that the film epitomizes the challenge of gun possession and self-defense within a neoliberal state.

This chapter shows how the Million Mom March helped parents, especially mothers, heal from the loss of a loved one to gun violence. It compares past maternalist movements to this one and shows the uneasy coexistence of feminism and maternalism. It explores how suburban mothers who were mostly white and urban mothers who were mostly black and Hispanic, came to believe that American society was sick, that all mothers were the antidote, and that together they could get gun control adopted and stop gun violence. While demonstrating the possibilities for coalition this chapter argues that the color-blind approach failed against the National Rifle Association, which evoked images negligent mothers, over-indulgent mothers, bad black mothers and criminal black beast rapists to defeat the anti- gun crusaders.

This chapter provides an accounting framework for monetizing the benefits of reducing gun violence. It illustrates how a “vaccine” would reduce the threat of gunshot injury. Tracing through all of the ways in which the public would benefit helps highlight a number of costs that have been ignored in the previous studies of this topic. This would also clarify the different ways in which gun violence reduces the quality of life in America. There would be less need for investments in prevention, avoidance, and harm reduction, both public and private, and less concern about being shot or losing a loved one or a neighbor to gunfire.

This chapter presents a reading of Unforgiven (1992), situating this film within a paradigmatic shift in the extension of due process protections for minorities, and the transformation of American self-defense doctrine brought about through a focus on battered women.

This chapter describes the statistical patterns of gun violence in America. Assaults and unintentional shootings are focused among young Hispanics and especially African Americans, whereas suicide rates tend to increase in the late middle ages and are higher for whites than minorities. All types of gun violence occur disproportionately among the poor and overwhelmingly on males rather than females, but no group is entirely spared. The chapter evaluates the array of policy measures targeting the reduction of gun use in violence, rather than the reduction of the overall rates of violence. In fact, it is the use of guns in violent crime that makes America unique among industrialized nations.

This chapter extends the discussion of the actions of the Black Student Leadership Network (BSLN) by highlighting the group's activities from 1993 to 1996. It specifically analyzes three organizing initiatives, the first of which is the Summer Freedom School program. Freedom schools, or alternative educational institutions for poor children, were utilized as pedagogical tools of protest for promoting children to challenge inequality. The second organizing initiative is the campaign against gun violence, a problem which became rampant during the 1990s. Together with the Children's Defense Fund (CDF) and the Black Community Crusade for Children (BCCC), the BSLN developed a strategy to reduce gun violence among youth, while connecting this effort to ameliorative juvenile justice policies. They lobbied for harsher prison sentences, putting more police officers on the street, and the death penalty for juveniles. The last initiative examined are the organizing activities in three regions: New York Metro, North and South Carolina, and California.

Mass incarceration exists in America on a scale unmatched in global history. America is also the only Western democracy that has not abolished the death penalty; and one of the nations that execute the most prisoners alongside abusive dictatorships like China, North Korea, and Iran. American justice is further characterized by pervasive racial discrimination, the peculiar “War on Drugs,” the dehumanizing treatment of juveniles, and routine use of harmful solitary confinement. Modern America has thus become a systematic human rights violator in criminal law and punishment. It was not always so, as foreigners once saw American justice as enlightened. Harsh justice has not made America particularly safe. It has the highest murder rate and the most gun violence in the West due to extraordinarily lax gun control shaped by die-hard partisans of the Second Amendment and lobbying by the NRA. Criminal justice reform gained more attention after shootings of unarmed black men in Ferguson and beyond led to the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. However, historical root causes behind this dimension of American exceptionalism have been widely overlooked, including systemic racism, populism, anti-intellectualism, market fundamentalism, and religious fundamentalism.

Chapter 3 offers narratives about gun violence; these narratives draw from public health tenets and practice. Contributors sketch a road map to how people with differing philosophies can act together to prevent gun deaths: Michael B. Siegel describes public health principles that can shape thinking about gun policy. Drawing from his experiences in Baltimore, Daniel W. Webster illustrates how gun violence has influenced urban life, examining the implications of aggressive law enforcement. His work with police and community members and his involvement with a gun violence reduction consortium yield strategies for reducing harm. Zeroing in on the community environments in which gun violence occurs, Bernadette Callahan Hohl illustrates how a public health approach can improve safety. Using examples from community-driven projects, she offers evidence that strengthening neighborhoods pays off. The chapter concludes an action agenda.

American gun ownership rates lead the world and rates of gun violence are high in comparison with other developed nations. Meanwhile, loose gun regulations make it easy to acquire firearms in the United States. Gun control advocates tend to believe that loose regulations and the abundance of firearms contribute to the high rates of gun violence. Gun advocates often deny this causal relationship. Meanwhile, the American public generally supports both gun rights and gun control. The chapters that follow address the ethical issue of appropriate gun policy for the United States. What sorts of gun control are morally defensible? The primary task here is to counter the strongest arguments against (relatively extensive) gun control and to develop positive arguments in favor of such gun control. The author comments on gun law and gun politics in the United States, and closes with policy suggestions.