One Nation Under Guns

“Brilliant and gut-wrenching… . As I read Erdozain’s book, I couldn’t stop sharing passages suggesting just how much we seem to have gotten wrong about the Second Amendment, and the grave results of that wrongness: a society in which we all—gun owners and non-gun owners alike—live beholden to the gun owners’ existential threat.”—Rachel Louise Snyder, New York Times Book Review“In this extraordinary book, Dominic Erdozain pulls back the curtain on the American obsession with guns. There we find the violence of slavery, the ugliness of nativism and nationalism, and the history of lies and misinterpretation about the second amendment. We see how the myth of ‘the law-abiding citizen with a gun’—the good guy—contributes to America’s killing fields. At once eye-opening and enraging, One Nation Under Guns is that rare book that can help change the way we live in this country.”—Eddie S. Glaude Jr., New York Times bestselling author of Begin Again and Democracy in Black“A scorching evisceration of how a disingenuous few and their allies warped the Constitution, weakened democracy, and waged war on reality to the point where the leading cause of death for children in America is now a bullet from a gun… . With withering prose and an arsenal of receipts, Dominic Erdozain exposes that the only thing more tortured than their argument is their justification for each new massacre in ‘the land of the free’—and even offers some welcome hope that we can stem the tide of eulogies before it’s too late.”—Cody Keenan, former chief speechwriter for President Barack Obama and bestselling author of Grace“In this cogent, colorful, and persuasive dissection of our peculiar gun culture, Dominic Erdozain explains the inexplicable: all the ‘lives lost to a myth’—the myth of a meaning of the Second Amendment manufactured out of whole cloth by Antonin Scalia. This book goes wide and deep on one of the most critical issues of our times.”—Jonathan Alter, bestselling author of His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life“Formidable and timely … Among the many strengths of this book is the author’s incisive commentary on the catastrophic failure of legislative safeguards… . A profound demolition of misguided gun-rights arguments and a compelling call to action.”—Kirkus Reviews, starred review

Dominic Erdozain is a writer and historian with a passion for bringing the past into dialogue with the present. Erdozain has written widely on the intellectual origins of democracy and has published opinion pieces for CNN, placing America’s gun problem in a broader philosophical context. A graduate of Oxford and Cambridge, he is currently a visiting professor at Emory University.