This is a fas­ci­nat­ing inter­view. Sev­er­al bits stood out to me. I men­tion two here:
“Joe Nocera at the Times runs a dai­ly tal­ly of gun killings. He’s not run­ning a dai­ly tal­ly of how many peo­ple defend them­selves with guns. For one thing we don’t know about it most of the time. David Hemen­way at Har­vard is very pro gun-con­trol and he thinks it hap­pens about 80,000 times a year. If that’s true, that means that guns are sav­ing 10 times as many peo­ple as they’re killing.”

“We have this impulse in the U.S. to do some­thing. We have no nation­al church, so the only way we can express our pub­lic moral­i­ty is to say there ought to be a law. It’s anti­thet­i­cal to the Amer­i­can can-do char­ac­ter to say there are cer­tain things we just can’t do much about.”

For the record, I am not a “gun guy.”

What Lib­er­als Need to Under­stand About ‘Gun Guys’

The author of a new book tries to rec­on­cile his per­son­al pol­i­tics with his fond­ness for firearms.

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