May 22, 2016:
A Connecticut judge has ruled that the families of the Sandy Hook elementary school mass shooting can gather facts to develop a civil action against Remington, the parent company for the Bushmaster AR-15 used by shooter Adam Lanza. If their case goes to trial, it would be a landmark challenge to the 2005 legislation that shields the gun industry from civil liability.
Read full article…
Politico America
May 15, 2016:
“The fight over gun control is often cast politically as a conflict between government and the interests of private citizens and companies. “She hates us, and she’s coming for every bit of our freedom,” National Rifle Association chief Wayne LaPierre told the Conservative Political Action Conference in March about Hillary Clinton’s gun control position.
It wasn’t always like this. In fact, it was the government that first incubated the American gun industry, and the icons of the American gun culture—including Winchester and Colt—thereafter developed a commercial market out of what had started as the public-private business of providing for the common defense. This public-private separation is at the root of our modern gun politics.”
Read full article…
Campaign for the American Reader
May 9, 2016:
“As luck would have it, page 99 of The Gunning of America points the reader right toward my biggest authorial challenge in the book—but also one of its singularities and unique contributions. The first half of the page describes the demise of Benjamin Tyler Henry, the embattled genius inventor of the fearsome repeater rifle that, before too long, will be renamed from the “Henry” rifle to the now-iconic “Winchester” rifle, in honor of its capitalist and manufacturer rather than its maker. Like other aspiring mechanics and Yankee inventors of his day, Henry had been “’wealthy several times,’ his obituary notes, and poor just as often.” But here, on this page, we’re seeing how the power is shifting in 1866 from the creative inventor with creative talent but no capital toward the industrialist, Oliver Winchester, who had capital but not creative talent.”
Read full article…
Salon.com
April 30, 2016:
“An abridged history of the American gun culture, told from legend and popular memory, might go like this: We were born a gun culture. Americans have an exceptional, unique, and timeless relationship to guns, starting with the militias of the Revolutionary War, and it developed on its own from there.”
Read full article…
Huffington Post
April 26, 2016:
“In her previous book, Marriage Confidential: Love in the Post-Romantic Age, Haag took aim at “semi-happy” marriages and explored how to recast them. In this one, she focuses on combat of a different kind. Haag delves into the history of the gun industry (Winchester, Colt) and explains how over the past 150 years it has shrewdly created a demand for its products. Rather than framing the debate about guns as a Second Amendment question, Haag argues that it is a business — and one in need of strong economic regulation.”
Read full article…
Don’t Go There
Process
July 7, 2016:
“The Paradox of Gun History”
Read full review…
The Trace
June 8, 2016:
“The NRA Has Been Making the Same Slippery Slope Argument Since 1934.”
Read full review…
Kera
June 1, 2016:
“The Second Amendment states that people have the right “to keep and bear arms.” This hour, we’ll talk about how many Americans have interpreted that right as a directive – and about how gun manufacturers have marketed their products throughout our nation’s history – with Pamela Haag.”
Listen to full interview…
To the Best of Our Knowledge
The Gun, May 22, 2016:
“Guns are a part of our national mythology. Just consider the Western, Annie Oakley, Daniel Boone — it’s hard to deny the role guns had in shaping America.”
Listen to full interview…
