Alexandra Filindra is Associate Professor of Political Science and Psychology at the University of Illinois, Chicago. This interview is based on her new book, Race, Rights, and Rifles: The Origins of the NRA and Contemporary Gun Culture (University of Chicago...
Four dead at a Dollar General store in Jacksonville today. That’s the 470th mass shooting in the United States this year–and it’s only August. I wrote this piece at The Washington Post after the 2019 shootings in El Paso, Texas...
We have a serious gun violence problem in the United States. While the National Rifle Association was meeting in Indianapolis, there were multiple-death shootings in Dadeville, Alabama; Louisville, Kentucky; Harrisonburg, Virginia; Honolulu, Hawaii; Spring, Texas; Orlando, Florida; Ahoskie, North Carolina;...
I am watching an interview with him on CNN right now. Here is his prayer yesterday in the Senate today:...
Andrew Clyde: Georgia ninth congressional district: George Santos: NY third congressional district: Anna Paulina Luna: Florida’s thirteenth congressional district: Thomas Massie: Kentucky’s fourth congressional district: Andy Ogles: Tennessee’s 5th congressional district. The home of The Covenant School: Lauren Boebert: Colorado’s...
The Covenant School is an elementary school affiliated with Covenant Presbyterian Church, a congregation in the Presbyterian Church in America. (Since the shooting this morning, Covenant Presbyterian Church appears to have taken down its website.) The school is a member...
Over at The Washington Post, the Pennsylvania senator writes about how he changed his mind about guns after Sandy Hook. Here is a taste: Iâm a U.S. senator who has done something rare in todayâs politics: Iâve changed my position...
Here is Michael Gerson’s recent Washington Post column: Is the slaughter of innocents the unavoidable price of freedom? A significant group of Americans believe it is. In a recent CBS-YouGov poll, 44 percent of Republicans agreed that mass shootings are...
Here is Sarah Pulliam Bailey at The Washington Post; Years before being suspected of killing eight people in a suburb of Atlanta, including six Asian women, Robert Aaron Long was active in his Southern Baptist congregation, his youth pastor said...
This graph is from a June 2020 survey from the Public Religion Research Institute: Here is Dawn Araujo-Hawkins at The Christian Century: Two days before Rusten Sheskey, a White police officer in Kenosha, Wisconsin, fired seven shots into the back...
“The most basic duty of government,” Trump said at the 2016 GOP convention, “is to defend the lives of its own citizens. Any government that fails to do so is a government unworthy to lead.” How should we think about...
Twenty years ago an Emory University history professor named Michael Bellesiles published a book arguing that early Americans were not all that interested in guns until after the Civil War. The book, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture, won...
Annie Thorn is a sophomore history major from Kalamazoo, Michigan and our intern here at The Way of Improvement Leads Home. As part of her internship she is writing a weekly column for us titled âOut of the Zoo.â It focuses...
I am getting tired of the way the gun debate plays out in the wake of mass shootings. Everyone tries to score political points or use the deaths of innocent lives to advance their own agendas. For example, here is...
Earlier today we posted a syllabus on guns in America. One of our readers directed me to a Project Muse website called Muse in Focus: Addressing Gun Violence. Here is what it is all about: Gun violence remains a pervasive...
The history website Bunk recently directed me to Caroline Light and Lindsay Livingston‘s “Gun Studies” syllabus at Public Books. Here is a taste: WEEK 1 âTo Keep and Bearâ: An Introduction to Gun Culture in the United States This weekâs readings...
According to theologian Candida Moss, “thoughts and prayers” can be good things, but they alone cannot solve the gun violence problem in the United States. To suggest otherwise is bad theology. Agreed. Here is a taste of her recent piece...
Mark Tseng-Putterman, a graduate student in history at Brown University, makes the case in this Boston Review piece. Here is a taste: Just as frontier violence marked a decisive period of American nation-building, so white supremacist shootings attempt to return the...
Two reporters contacted me this week to talk about Christian nationalism and the shootings in El Paso and Dayton. I told both of them that Christian nationalism does not necessarily have to result in white supremacy. As I argued in Was...
Here is last night’s Shannon Bream show on Fox.  Fast forward to the 36:40 mark to see court evangelical Robert Jeffress and radio host Ethan Bearman discuss my recent Washington Post article on the connection between abortion and gun control. [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXJiYjsSIlo&w=560&h=315] I...
