Ten top books on guns in America

Catherine Habgood is a writer and editor living in New York City. She is one of the fiction editors at The Washington Square Review and is pursuing an MFA in Fiction at New York University.

"To understand America’s complicated culture of guns is an interdisciplinary pursuit: legal, historical, sociological, economic," she writes at Lit Hub, shere she tagged ten" exemplary attempts at that understanding." One title on the list:

Pamela Haag, The Gunning of America: Business and the Making of American Gun Culture, 2016

It’s too easy to forget that even objects imbued with such political controversy, existential power and cultural deification as the “gun” are also products manufactured, goods—bought, sold and advertised. Pamela Haag’s The Gunning of America corrects “the perception of the gun’s inevitability in American life by showing its history as a commodity invented and then deliberately marketed and distributed like any other widget or household appliance.” (The New Republic). She contends that “the gun industry created, rather than responded to, America’s gun culture,” and “successfully exploited notions of frontier individualism, responsibility, and masculinity” to the exclusive benefit of the bottom line. Haag ascribes the origins of the gun industry to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, illustrating how their business success calcified the American interest in the gun, as it is today.

Read about another book on the list.

The Page 99 Test: The Gunning of America.

--Marshal Zeringue