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

Download or read book Guns, Traumas and Exceptionalism: America in the Twenty-First Century written by Howard Epstein and published by . This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.