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"Our focus on the negative effects of red-state policies and the positive effects of blue-state ones made it almost too easy for gun rights supporters to cast public health research as biased, ‘tainted’, and hostile toward red-state traditions, a tool of a government that wanted to take away people’s guns."

I cannot believe that there are no entries in the index for: masculinity. Misogyny. Intimate partner violence. It is incomprehensible that a scholar as accomplished as Metzl is failing to address aggrieved masculinity and entitlement as core factors of firearm violence.

"Through much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, gun-related injury and death were simply not considered by most people to be public health issues. That’s because guns were widely seen as tools used by soldiers, hunters, gun collectors, or criminals, and gun ownership was largely regulated in public life by webs of federal and state laws."

"A keyword search for “firearm” in the expansive database PubMed—which catalogs more than seven million full-text publications spanning several centuries of biomedical, public health, and life science research—reveals that from 1820 until the mid-1980s, the average number of published articles by US scholars that studied firearms was less than one per year."

"Public health approaches had relatively little to say about the frameworks beyond health and safety that shaped what guns meant to people. We had no metrics for red-state liberty, or protection, or patriotism, or fear.... Public health thereby had relatively little credibility speaking to the meaning of guns in the interactions of everyday life."