Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Our Sheep To Slaughter, Courtney Collado

Dance (MFA) Theses

This thesis paper and accompanying film explore the reality of mothering a school-aged child in America. The written document describes the creative manifestation and explains the stalemate at which American parents and gun sense advocates find themselves: over the past four decades of documented school rampage shootings in America, precious few laws have been enacted to protect American schoolchildren from gun violence. By June of 2021, a year in which many children were taught virtually, nine children have been murdered by gunfire on school grounds. Rampage shootings are a distinctly American issue, with little to no action being taken on …

Civil Religion And The Second Amendment, Shivaun Corry

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The American approach to legal hermeneutics emerged from the covenant theology of the Puritans. American civil religion understands the Constitution to be based in natural laws: a secularized conception of God-given rights. To change the text would collapse the epistemological framework of the nation. When a nation sees its constitution as a sacred text, then the answer to contemporary problems cannot be to change that text; rather, it must be to return to the text with an even more fundamentalist hermeneutic. Both gun rights advocate Charlton Heston, and gun control advocate Barak Obama, argued their cases using a fundamentalist hermeneutic, …

Leadbetter, Bruce Roberts Mutard

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

A satirical comic about the rogue, right-wing, gun-loving US Senator Leadbetter, who wins the presidency and installs a dictatorship, which solves all social problems with extreme prejudice.

A Comparative Analysis Of The Politics Of Gun Control In The United States And Australia, Nicholas Leone

College Honors Program

This thesis centers on the interrelationships and differences in firearm legislation and culture within the United States of America and Australia. As a result of the Port Arthur Massacre on April 28, 1996, Australia was faced with an unprecedented mass shooting that completely shifted Australian politics and culture regarding firearm safety and availability. Thus, the thesis inquiries into the effectiveness of Australia’s buyback program as well as the cultural and political factors that allowed for such legislation to be passed. After suffering 118 mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982, the history of the United States regarding gun control is …

Sanders, William Willard "Whitey," 1930-2021 (Mss 659), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 659. Correspondence, articles and miscellaneous material documenting the career of newspaper editorial cartoonist Bill “Whitey” Sanders. Includes letters from readers, public figures and fellow cartoonists, video of programs and appearances, and material related to Sanders’ books and his participation in professional organizations.

Thoughts And Prayers, Chloe Kardasopoulos

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

Examining the symbolic Gun against its tangible counterpart illuminates abstract attachments of power and superiority this nation associates with the weapon. These elements loaded in the Gun transform the weapon into an object representative of American identity. Analyzing ideological commitments within the Gun guides a critical response to examine disproportionately increasing national gun violence against stagnant federal gun control. The ongoing gun debate must be analyzed in its entirety, beginning at its source - the Second Amendment. Scholars such as Gary Wills dissect the Second Amendment to extract its contextualized intent from modern writers’ manipulated interpretations. It is not the …

Bridges, Richard Wilson, 1943-2015 (Mss 646), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 646. Material, chiefly correspondence, of Bowling Green, Kentucky pastor Richard W. Bridges, who served as Board of Directors’ Chairman for the Western Recorder, the statewide newspaper of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. During Bridges’ Chairmanship, the editor, Jack Sanford, died. Bridges and the Board’s executive committee assumed the paper’s management and editorial responsibilities. This collection provides insights into the conservative takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention in the 1980s.

The Logical Fallacies In Political Discourse, Zilin Cidre Zhou

Summer Research Program

I examined the use of logical fallacies in political discourse. Logical fallacies are fraudulent tricks people use in their argument to make it sound more credible while what they really do is to fool the audience. Out of more than 300 kinds of fallacies, I focused on 18 common ones by analyzing their use in debates about political issues. During conducting my research, I noted that being aware of my mental state is very important if I want to accurately detect the fallacies. Furthermore, while watching two sides debating, being impartial is as significant as staying calm. I also need …

Security In The Concert Industry, Rebeca Zepeda

Backstage Pass

No abstract provided.

Resurrecting The "Dead" Second Amendment: How The Libertarian Legal Movement Has Shaped Gun Control Litigation, Anthony M. Sierzega

Politics Honors Papers

For nearly two centuries following its adoption, the Second Amendment was largely ignored and even referred to as a “dead amendment.” Virtually all legal scholarship considered the right protected by the amendment to be a collective right written into the Constitution to protect local militias from a powerful federal standing army. However, beginning in the late 1970s a surge of libertarian scholarship began to emerge promoting the Second Amendment as a safeguard for an individual right to bear arms without any connection to military service. Promoted by the National Rifle Association and libertarian theorists, the individual-right theory began to gain …

Gun Rights Talk, Joseph Blocher

Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Red Drops For A Rainbow, Zakiya A. Brown

SURGE

Splashes of pool water licked my ankles, scenting my coffee-colored toes with chlorine. Bareback guardians, robed in red, hovered high as flocks of fleshy tangible innocence skipped jubilantly across the pool deck and disappeared into a wet square pocket of sapphire. [excerpt of poem]

Carter, Tim Lee, 1910-1987 (Mss 80), Manuscripts & Folklife Archives

MSS Finding Aids

Finding aid only for Manuscripts Collection 80. Correspondence, photographs, audiotapes, film, clippings, general office files, and records of legislative proceedings relating to the political career of Tim Lee Carter, U.S. Representative (Republican) for Kentucky's Fifth Congressional District, 1965-1981.

The Gold Standard Of Gun Control - Book Review Of Joyce Malcolm, Guns And Violence: The English Experience, David B. Kopel, Joanne D. Eisen, Paul Gallant

David B Kopel

Guns and Violence tells a remarkable story of a society's self-destruction, of how a government in a few decades managed to reverse six hundred years of social progress in violence reduction. The book is also a testament to the amazing self-confidence of British governments; Labour and Conservative alike have proceeded with an extreme anti-self-defense agenda, although the agenda has never had much supporting evidence beyond the government's own platitudes.

Columbine School Massacre, Eric S. Yellin

History Faculty Publications

On 20 April 1999, in one of the deadliest school shootings in national history, two students at Columbine High School in Littleton, Jefferson County, Colorado, killed twelve fellow students and a teacher and injured twenty-three others before committing suicide. Eric Harris, age eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, age seventeen, used homemade bombs, two sawed-off twelve-gauge shotguns, a nine-millimeter semiautomatic rifle, and a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol in a siege that began shortly after 11 A.M.

Self-Defense: The Equalizer, David B. Kopel, Linda Gorman

David B Kopel

Experiments in tightening gun-control laws have eroded the right of self defense and failed to stop serious crime. Studies Japan, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.

Lethal Laws, David B. Kopel

David B Kopel

Book review of Lethal Laws, which examines the relationsip between gun prohibition and genocide in Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, China, Cambodia, Guatemala, Uganda, and Armenia.

“Sorry, Wrong Number”: Why Media Polls On Gun Control Are So Often Unreliable, David B. Kopel, Gary Mauser

David B Kopel

How scientific are the polls reported in the media on the gun control issue? Without arguing for or against gun controls, this article examines the interviewing and

sampling methods used by media polls and finds that some polls claiming impressive majorities in favor of severe gun controls may not be accurate.

This article was originally published in Political Communication and Persuasion, vol. 9, pp. 69-92 (1992). This web version is a from a reprint (without the tables) in the Journal on Firearms & Public Policy, volume 6, pp. 23-53 (1994). Starred page numbers [*24] indicate the beginning of a new …