Gun control Archives - Public Seminar

North America

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

A review of Exit Wounds: How America’s Guns Fuel Violence Across the Border

May 22, 2025 • by Jeremy Robson

In her work along the US–Mexico border, Ieva Jusionyte, an anthropologist and associate professor at Brown University, kept coming across similar stories: people fleeing from gun violence. The fruit of years spent in the field with journalists, federal agents, and members of organized criminal groups, her latest book, Exit Wounds: ...

United States Makes Weapons—Then Sells Them to Mexican Cartels

Democracy

It’s Never the Gun, Is It?

Analyzing the right’s Second Amendment shell game after the tragic Covenant school shooting

April 3, 2023 • by Claire Potter

How do you square support for gun ownership, virtually without restriction, with this terrible, unjust tragedy?...

Democracy

“I’ve had enough”

When are we going to do something?

May 25, 2022 • by Heather Cox Richardson

Today, a gunman murdered at least 19 children and 2 adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. For years now, after one massacre or another, I have written some version of the same article, explaining that the nation’s current gun free-for-all is not traditional but, rather, is a symptom of ...

Prisons and Police

When Children Commit Atrocities

Crimes that tear at our hearts are also opportunities to forgive

January 5, 2022 • by Harold Pollack

A member of my own family was beaten to death by a high school student. That boy is now a man. He walks the streets today. I believe justice has been served....

Politics

Could We Learn to Live Somewhere Between “Never Again” and “Thoughts and Prayers?”

The culture war over guns must end for school shootings to end

December 3, 2021 • by Claire Potter

You know the United States is edging back to a post-Covid normal when a distraught kid takes his father’s 9 mm Sig Sauer, purchased on Black Friday, to his Michigan high school and opens fire. It is the most recent of 53 school shootings this year that have killed 17 people and wounded ...

Could We Learn to Live Somewhere Between “Never Again” and “Thoughts and Prayers?”

Politics

In America, Political Violence Is Normal. So Normal It’s Invisible.

The right to petition for redress for grievances enshrined in the First Amendment runs against the grain of the right to bear arms in the Second Amendment

November 29, 2021 • by John Stoehr

It should always be on people's minds. Political violence is on people’s minds now that Kyle Rittenhouse has been acquitted. According to USA Today, far-right groups celebrated last week’s unsurprising verdict. “Kyle Rittenhouse is the hero we’ve been waiting for” was posted on the Gab profile for VDare, a self-consciously fascist organization headquartered ...

In America, Political Violence Is Normal. So Normal It’s Invisible.

Politics

What Kyle Rittenhouse Teaches Us

Whatever the Kenosha jury ultimately decides, the American right’s embrace of citizen violence, and the effects of their propaganda on boys, is far more troubling

November 16, 2021 • by Claire Potter

I watched Kyle Rittenhouse’s testimony last week, and as he crumpled up in tears, I thought: what a sad, stupid story. For anyone who has missed the background to the Rittenhouse trial: this is the guy who, at 17, decided to go to Kenosha, Wisconsin, from his home in Antioch, Illinois, ...

Issues of our Times

The Atlanta and Boulder Mass Shootings

Past Present Podcast, Episode 273

March 30, 2021 • by Nicole Hemmer, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: As public spaces reopen, so too have mass shootings returned. Neil referred to this Slate piece about the coverage of the Atlanta shootings, and Natalia cited Melissa Jeltsen’s article in The Cut, her own essay about massage in Nursing Clio, ...

Feature

Anti-Latino Nativism, Ronald Reagan, and Sound Baths

Past Present Episode 192

August 13, 2019 • by Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Nicole Hemmer and Neil J. Young

Here are some links and references mentioned during this week’s show: The mass shooter in El Paso deliberately targeted Latinos who he believed were “invading” Texas. Niki referred to Peter Brimelow’s 1996 book, Alien Nation: Common Sense About America’s Immigration Disaster. Natalia cited Samuel Huntington’s Foreign Policy essay, “The Hispanic Challenge,” and historian Ruben Donato’s book, The Other ...

Feature

How Latinos are America’s Greatest Hope for Economic Growth and Renewal

If the nearly 60 million Latinos in the US were a country, they’d be the world’s 7th largest.

August 9, 2019 • by Juan Cole

But as I will demonstrate, in 2019 it is ridiculous to divide Americans by ethnicity. We all need each other to thrive. Without the 40% of the Texas population that are Latinos, the state’s economy would collapse over time. Of course I am making these points because of the gut-wrenching atrocity ...

Feature

More Shootings and You Still Ask Why?

You are not safe.

August 7, 2019 • by Peter Alexander Meyers

Now, imagine from whose hand, in what print, on which screen you would accept to see that picture. How could you not feel revulsion? Disgust? Sympathy? Outrage? You would avert your eyes, turn it off, walk away. You would reject the thing and shun its maker. Come down hard on ...

Blue Monday

Some Banal Thoughts About the Mutuality of Evil in our Midst

We Must Defeat Trump, Not Entreat Him

August 5, 2019 • by Jeffrey C. Isaac

According to the Gun Violence Archive, these episodes are the 250th and 251st mass shootings of the year. It defines a mass shooting as “four or more shot and/or killed in a single event [incident], at the same general time and location not including the shooter.” As USA Today noted: “The bloody 24 hours also ...