The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment by Thom Hartmann

This lucid but decidedly radical polemic will probably not convince those who disagree, but it will speak to progressives. Hartmann’s proposed solutions include laws requiring “smart guns” that only fire for an authorized user, bans on semiautomatic weapons, and diminishing racial inequality (and therefore violence) through integration, reparations in the form of affirmative action, and better educational opportunities for African-Americans.

that facilitate gun culture, among them excessive money in politics (which allows gun manufacturers outsize political influence), a wrongheaded Supreme Court, and growing inequity in general, which 40 studies link to increased rates of violence in a society. Hartmann follows this analysis with a passionately argued indictment of America’s gun culture, which he identifies as the source of mass shootings and white supremacist violence. He contends that it was actually intended to serve two purposes: ensuring the continued existence of colonial “slave patrols”-state-sanctioned militias that hunted escaped slaves-and to prevent a standing army, which Thomas Jefferson believed was a threat to democracy that could only be remedied by a Swiss-style citizen militia. Thom Hartmann, the most popular progressive radio host in America and a New York Times best-selling author, looks at the real history of guns in America and what we can do to limit both their lethal impact and the power of the gun lobby. In this lucid but partisan treatise, Hartmann ( The Crash of 2016), a nationally syndicated progressive radio host, dismisses the conventional wisdom that the Second Amendment was intended as a bulwark against an overreaching government.

The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment by Thom Hartmann