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The Armed Society And Its Friends: A Reckoning, Charles W. Collier

UF Law Faculty Publications

This Article provides a selective introduction to some of the main social, cultural, historical, and intellectual issues surrounding gun violence and the desultory policy “debates” over gun control in America.

Unregulated gun violence, unrestricted gun violence, unlimited gun violence: these are the grave “new normal” (a term coined in financial economics) on the otherwise pastoral landscape of America. Sociologically speaking, this level of gun violence is no longer considered deviant, such that “special sanctions” would be imposed to prevent it.

Gun violence and the lack of gun control have also been described as “tragic”—a cultural tragedy—and so they are, though …