Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century
Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century

Author: Howard Epstein

Publisher:

Published: 2017-01-26

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781542802031

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What is the most damaging gun crime of all? It's pretending that gun-control laws, on their own, are ever going to achieve anything. They didn't work at Columbine, they didn't work at Virginia Tech, at Sandy Hook or at the scenes of any other rampage-killings and, alone, they are not the answer to those outrages that may yet come along.Horrifically, American students are three times more likely to die by the bullet in the schools and colleges in America than those in all such places of learning of the rest of the world combined. And the workplace death-rate in the USA is twice that of the rest of the world combined.As gun control alone plainly does not work, it is time for something new. It is time to improve gun control regulation by addressing the problem of gun crime through gun culture. Not only does gun-crime cause trauma, but also traumas cause gun-crime. And America has been battered by more traumas than any comparable nation. In this book, I set out to show how twenty national traumas, in the 80 years from the Wall Street Crash to the Credit Crunch, have battered the American psyche and mixed in a toxic way with the gun, an icon in US society, to unleash almost unchecked violence. I explain how America got to be so violent, and the better place it can get to by dealing with gun crime as a matter of gun culture. I suggest two new paradigms for alleviating the problem - two highly-practical routes for reducing gun-crime that need to be considered, debated and adopted. In this way, I argue, the tide can be turned. America is exceptional in many more good ways than bad, and has the vitality and the strength to achieve redemption.

Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism
Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism

Author: Howard David Epstein

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-08-12

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 9781536926927

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What is the most damaging gun crime of all? It's pretending that gun-control laws, on their own, are ever going to achieve anything. They didn't work at Columbine, they didn't work at Virginia Tech, at Sandy Hook or at the scenes of any other rampage-killings and, alone, they are not the answer to those outrages that may yet come along. Horrifically, American students are three times more likely to die by the bullet in the schools and colleges in America than those in all such places of learning of the rest of the world combined. And the workplace death-rate in the USA is twice that of the rest of the world combined. As gun control alone plainly does not work, it is time for something new. It is time to improve gun control regulation by addressing the problem of gun crime through gun culture. Not only does gun-crime cause trauma, but also traumas cause gun-crime. And America has been battered by more traumas than any comparable nation. In this book, I set out to show how twenty national traumas, in the 80 years from the Wall Street Crash to the Credit Crunch, have battered the American psyche and mixed in a toxic way with the gun, an icon in US society, to unleash almost unchecked violence. I explain how America got to be so violent, and the better place it can get to by dealing with gun crime as a matter of gun culture. I suggest two new paradigms for alleviating the problem - two highly-practical routes for reducing gun-crime that need to be considered, debated and adopted. In this way, I argues, the tide can be turned. America is exceptional in many more good ways than bad, and has the vitality and the strength to achieve redemption. (c) Howard David Epstein - London August 2016

Domestic Gun Control and International Small Arms Control in Africa
Domestic Gun Control and International Small Arms Control in Africa

Author: Niklas Hultin

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2022-08-08

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 3031077385

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This book, based on field research in the West African country of The Gambia, explores how domestic gun control is shaped by international efforts and how local actors interact with international organizations or opt not to do so. The book also shows how the question of who can have what kind of gun under what circumstances is an intrinsic question to modern societies across the world, but it is seldom one that is addressed in sub-Saharan Africa except in cases of post-conflict countries. Small arms control and gun control are often treated as separate efforts, with the former the domain of international actors such as the United Nations and the latter being of concern to the domestic politics of countries such as the United States. By focusing on a country that has never seen the outbreak of a civil war, the book is able to disentangle the complex roots of gun control in Africa, its origins in colonial era legislation, its reverberations across social life, and how it shapes contemporary understandings of groups ranging for security guards to hunters.

Contemporary Historical Fiction, Exceptionalism and Community
Contemporary Historical Fiction, Exceptionalism and Community

Author: Susan Strehle

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2020-10-19

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 303055466X

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This book analyzes a significant group of contemporary historical fictions that represent damaging, even catastrophic times for people and communities; written “after the wreck,” they recall instructive pasts. The novels chronicle wars, slavery, racism, child abuse and genocide; they reveal damages that ensue when nations claim an exalted, exceptionalist identity and violate the human rights of their Others. In sympathy with the exiled, writers of these contemporary historical fictions create alternative communities on the state’s outer fringes. These fictive communities include where the state excludes; they foreground relations of debt and obligation to the group in place of individualism, competition and private property. Rather than assimilating members to a single identity with a unified set of views, the communities open multiple possibilities for belonging. Analyzing novels from Britain, Australia and the U.S., along with additional transnational examples, Susan Strehle explores the political vision animating some contemporary historical fictions.

Saving the Security State
Saving the Security State

Author: Inderpal Grewal

Publisher: Duke University Press

Published: 2017-10-27

Total Pages: 319

ISBN-13: 082237255X

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In Saving the Security State Inderpal Grewal traces the changing relations between the US state and its citizens in an era she calls advanced neoliberalism. Marked by the decline of US geopolitical power, endless war, and increasing surveillance, advanced neoliberalism militarizes everyday life while producing the “exceptional citizens”—primarily white Christian men who reinforce the security state as they claim responsibility for protecting the country from racialized others. Under advanced neoliberalism, Grewal shows, others in the United States strive to become exceptional by participating in humanitarian projects that compensate for the security state's inability to provide for the welfare of its citizens. In her analyses of microfinance programs in the global South, security moms, the murders at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, and the post-9/11 crackdown on Muslim charities, Grewal exposes the fissures and contradictions at the heart of the US neoliberal empire and the centrality of race, gender, and religion to the securitized state.

American Exceptionalism and Human Rights
American Exceptionalism and Human Rights

Author: Michael Ignatieff

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2009-01-10

Total Pages: 360

ISBN-13: 1400826888

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With the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq, the most controversial question in world politics fast became whether the United States stands within the order of international law or outside it. Does America still play by the rules it helped create? American Exceptionalism and Human Rights addresses this question as it applies to U.S. behavior in relation to international human rights. With essays by eleven leading experts in such fields as international relations and international law, it seeks to show and explain how America's approach to human rights differs from that of most other Western nations. In his introduction, Michael Ignatieff identifies three main types of exceptionalism: exemptionalism (supporting treaties as long as Americans are exempt from them); double standards (criticizing "others for not heeding the findings of international human rights bodies, but ignoring what these bodies say of the United States); and legal isolationism (the tendency of American judges to ignore other jurisdictions). The contributors use Ignatieff's essay as a jumping-off point to discuss specific types of exceptionalism--America's approach to capital punishment and to free speech, for example--or to explore the social, cultural, and institutional roots of exceptionalism. These essays--most of which appear in print here for the first time, and all of which have been revised or updated since being presented in a year-long lecture series on American exceptionalism at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government--are by Stanley Hoffmann, Paul Kahn, Harold Koh, Frank Michelman, Andrew Moravcsik, John Ruggie, Frederick Schauer, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Carol Steiker, and Cass Sunstein.

Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea
Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea

Author: Joshua Horwitz

Publisher: University of Michigan Press

Published: 2009-04-29

Total Pages: 286

ISBN-13: 0472033700

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"Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea recasts the gun debate by showing its importance to the future of democracy and the modern regulatory state. Until now, gun rights advocates had effectively co-opted the language of liberty and democracy and made it their own. This book is an important first step in demonstrating how reasonable gun control is essential to the survival of democracy and ordered liberty." ---Saul Cornell, Ohio State University When gun enthusiasts talk about constitutional liberties guaranteed by the Second Amendment, they are referring to freedom in a general sense, but they also have something more specific in mind---freedom from government oppression. They argue that the only way to keep federal authority in check is to arm individual citizens who can, if necessary, defend themselves from an aggressive government. In the past decade, this view of the proper relationship between government and individual rights and the insistence on a role for private violence in a democracy has been co-opted by the conservative movement. As a result, it has spread beyond extreme militia groups to influence state and national policy. In Guns, Democracy, and the Insurrectionist Idea, Joshua Horwitz and Casey Anderson set the record straight. They challenge the proposition that more guns equal more freedom and expose Insurrectionism as a true threat to freedom in the United States today. Joshua Horwitz received a law degree from George Washington University and is currently a visiting scholar at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. Casey Anderson holds a law degree from Georgetown University and is currently a lawyer in private practice in Washington, D.C.

Fantasyland
Fantasyland

Author: Kurt Andersen

Publisher: Random House

Published: 2017-09-05

Total Pages: 481

ISBN-13: 1588366871

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

When America Stopped Being Great
When America Stopped Being Great

Author: Nick Bryant

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2021-03-04

Total Pages: 385

ISBN-13: 1472985494

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'Nick Bryant is brilliant. He has a way of showing you what you've been missing from the whole story whilst never leaving you feeling stupid.' – Emily Maitlis 'Bryant is a genuine rarity, a Brit who understands America' – Washington Post In When America Stopped Being Great, veteran reporter and BBC New York correspondent Nick Bryant reveals how America's decline paved the way for Donald Trump's rise, sowing division and leaving the country vulnerable to its greatest challenge of the modern era. Deftly sifting through almost four decades of American history, from post-Cold War optimism, through the scandal-wracked nineties and into the new millennium, Bryant unpacks the mistakes of past administrations, from Ronald Reagan's 'celebrity presidency' to Barack Obama's failure to adequately address income and racial inequality. He explains how the historical clues, unseen by many (including the media) paved the way for an outsider to take power and a country to slide towards disaster. As Bryant writes, 'rather than being an aberration, Trump's presidency marked the culmination of so much of what had been going wrong in the United States for decades – economically, racially, politically, culturally, technologically and constitutionally.' A personal elegy for an America lost, unafraid to criticise actors on both sides of the political divide, When America Stopped Being Great takes the long view, combining engaging storytelling with recent history to show how the country moved from the optimism of Reagan's 'Morning in America' to the darkness of Trump's 'American Carnage'. It concludes with some of the most dramatic events in recent memory, in an America torn apart by a bitterly polarised election, racial division, the national catastrophe of the coronavirus and the threat to US democracy evidenced by the storming of Capitol Hill.

Gun Violence in America
Gun Violence in America

Author: Alexander DeConde

Publisher: UPNE

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 420

ISBN-13: 9781555535926

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An in-depth analysis of the folklore surrounding gun use and the state of the debate in today's political climate.