Harel Shapira: Basic Pistol, Gebunden

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From an award-winning scholar of the political right comes an immersive and harrowing journey through the other-world of gun schools and the curriculum of violence they teach.

To understand why so many people die by the gun, we must first understand how people live by it.

This is the realization that led sociologist Harel Shapira to embed himself in Tactical Training, a popular firearms school in rural Texas. Here, students are inducted into an ideology of self-defense, where any grocery store trip could become a shootout, any day could be the day that a home intruder tears a family apart, and relying on the police is a death sentence.

Forty-two classes, ten thousand rounds of ammunition, and one concealed carry license later, Shapira has emerged with Basic Pistol , a dark and richly textured plunge into a uniquely American way of living. Basic Pistol follows Shapira's fraught journey through Tactical Training's extensive curriculum and into a community for whom gun ownership is livelihood, is tradition, is identity. It exposes how today's gun culture, and the racist fears and fantasies it breeds, have eaten away at the very fabric of American society, empowering the "good guy with a gun" to claim he had no choice but to shoot.

Page-turning and paradigm-shifting, Basic Pistolshows that if there's any hope of reining in gun violence, it must start not with the guns themselves, but with the people who carry them.