America’s Gun Laws
How did we get here?
Kansas City shooting of a Black teenager who was at the wrong address, New York woman in the wrong driveway shot dead, Alabama birthday party mass shooting, Nashville school mass shooting, Half Moon Bay mass shooting, Monterey Park Lunar New Year mass shooting, and many, many more!
How did we get here?!? I don’t remember it being this bad before, back in the 1980s or even the ‘90s.
My distinguished guest, Dr. Robert Spitzer, takes us through the history of how we got here. How did an amendment about the militia that was pretty much an artifact of the 18th century — like the 3rd amendment about quartering soldiers in our homes — was resurrected and reinterpreted. How the NRA morphed from helping the government write gun regulations to vehemently opposing regulations. And how mass shootings increased after the assault weapons ban lapsed in 2004. And then, there is Justice Scalia’s landmark decision in the Heller case, which changed so much about gun rights and regulations.
Dr. Spitzer is a professor at the Political Science Department of the State University of New York at Cortland, aka SUNY Cortland. He is the author of fifteen books, including several on gun control. His latest book, which was published this year, is The Gun Dilemma, which we discuss in this episode.
