Living with Guns: A Liberal's Case for the Second Amendment by Craig Whitney

Description

America’s war over gun control has raged since the 1960s. In 2008, the Supreme Court startled the left by concluding that with the Second Amendment the founders elevated “above all other interests” the right to bear arms “in defense of hearth and home.” Liberals feared the NRA would succeed in rolling back regulations nationwide. Discussion about guns in America has been stalemated, shortcircuited, and dominated by rigidly and mutually intolerant ideologies. Yet we may be closer to a solution than either side may imagine.

In Living With Guns, veteran New York Times editor Craig Whitney carefully reexamines America’s relationship with guns, showing how guns are an important part of American culture. The earliest colonists needed them to survive. We have nearly 300 million of them today. Trying to restrict gun ownership doesn’t effectively deter crime—we need to get serious about what actually works. Whitney shows that, if we focus on controlling violence rather than guns themselves, the Second Amendment may not be so lethal as the left would like to think.