For several years after the 1998 Columbine high school massacre, and again after the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre, I wrote so often about the causes and consequences of American gun slavery that I felt a bit like the 19th-century abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, railing against an evil that seemed indomitable.
In our own time, the real root causes of our gun mayhem seem so hard for Americans to understand or even to rebut that my efforts to highlight them — especially in the Washington Monthly in 2016 and in the Atlantic, with law professor Daniel Greenwood, as well as on the Brian Lehrer show on WNYC — hardly altered public perceptions.
