Metzl: Don’t Underestimate the Psychic Power Guns Hold Over Mere Mortals
After years of interviews for the book, I have seen how owning a gun can make people more conservative, and more concerned that liberals will impose laws that leave them unprotected. I spoke to one man who was an “anti-gun liberal” for the first 35 years of his life. Then he started carrying a gun […]
An Academic Acknowleges the ‘Disastrous, Unintended Consequences’ of Taking a Public Health Approach to Gun Violence
There’s a long and proud history of public health scholars, doctors, and activists taking a health framework to consumer products that kill people. That playbook worked well with cigarettes or faulty seat belts in cars or asbestos insulation. The idea was that if you could show the negative health effects of a product, that would […]
Metzl: We Need a Holistic, Societal (and Expensive) Strategy to Get Benighted Red-Staters to Swallow More Restrictions on Their Gun Rights
I’ve come to believe that in the current moment, when democracy itself is at stake, gun safety needs to improve people’s lives in ways that they can see and feel, strengthen the concrete undergirding civil society, and allow blue and red state Americans to imagine broader coalitions based on shared interests rather than on shared […]
Metzl: We Need to Take a Structuralist Approach to Disrupting the Gun Ownership Binary in America
I tracked the history of [trying to regulate guns like cigarettes] going back to the ’90s. And I think, at some point, it made sense. We had had these campaigns in public health in the past. Here is someone whose product is killing people, and we came in as public health advocates and experts […]