Status Updates From What We've Become: Living a...

"But in the broader sense, Travis Reinking planned his drive from Illinois to Nashville to the Antioch Waffle House, his road was paved by a system that not only validated the rights of men like himself to own firearms and carry them in public, but cast armed white men as moral responses to Black aggression-a system that ensured that white Americans remained disproportiantely armed and unduly dangerous as a result"

“Mental health emerged as another front in public health’s engagement with guns and shootings…the meanings of ‘mental illness’ in connection to mass shootings became even more contested. That was because mental illness functioned as a narrative that diagnosed the potential motives of shooters, but papered over the contested pathologies of the social and political systems that surrounded their crimes”

"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."