After Gun Violence: Deliberation and Memory in an Age of Political Gridlock by Craig Rood (review)

Abstract

Aparadox lies at the heart of the debate over guns and gun control in the United States. A clear majority of the voting public supports a number of different proposals to regulate access to firearms and the type of firearms available for sale. According to a May 2019 Quinnipiac University poll, nearly three-quarters of Americans say that more needs to be done to address gun violence; 94 percent support universal background checks for those purchasing firearms; and 63 percent support a nationwide ban on the sale of assault weapons. However, there seems to be little sign of any progress with these issues. In fact, there is even evidence from a Pew Research Center study published in March 2018 that gun laws have been loosened in the years since the mass murder of 20 children and six teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. In After Gun Violence, Craig Rood leverages scholarship on public memory to help explain the general gridlock that marks contemporary discourse about guns and gun control in the United States. Putting public memory in conversation with deliberation invites an analysis that cuts both ways: “First, public deliberation shapes public memory . . . Second, public memory shapes public deliberation” (24). A product of rhetoric itself, public memory influences the choices we make when deciding what is worth talking about; what meanings we make about what is happening now; and what courses of action are warranted, feasible, and virtuous. These acts will undoubtedly, although partially, be remembered when future interlocutors find themselves pressed to make meaning about what is happening in their own time. Rood explains the effectiveness of the gun lobby in resisting legal reform largely in terms of its highly selective remembrance of the Founding