Gun nation: a journey to the heart of America’s gun culture – video

Gun Nation is a revealing and unsettling video journey to the heart of America’s deadly love affair with the gun.

In the 18 years since Zed Nelson’s seminal photography book Gun Nation was published, 500,000 Americans have been killed by firearms in the US and many more injured. Nelson returns to the people he met, photographs them again, and asks why America is a nation still with an insatiable appetite for firearms.

Avoiding stereotypical images of gang members or extremists, Nelson focuses instead on another side of America’s gun culture: the mainly white middle classes who sell and purchase guns in vast numbers.

Nelson’s two-decade-long rapport with his photographic subjects gives unique and intimate access to the minds of gun owners. As they cling to the notion of a centuries-old ‘right to bear arms’, Nelson seeks to understand why – despite the enormous death toll – there is such fierce resistance to gun control laws, particularly the debate about ownership of assault weapons.

Gun Nation explores the paradox of why America’s most potent symbol of freedom is also one of its greatest killers.

Zed Nelson is an award-winning photographer and filmmaker. Gun Nation was awarded first prize in the World Press Photo Contest, the Alfred Eisenstaedt Award and the Visa d’or.

Gun control in the US – toddlers kill more people than terrorists

Photograph: Facebook/Jamie Gilt

On Sunday March 13, The Guardian newspaper published a frightening article about gun control in the US and how Jamie Gilt, who has built a thriving web presence on the argument that guns are perfectly safe around kids, was shot by her young child.

From the article in The Guardian:

Growing up here myself didn’t prepare me for how distinctly, viscerally frightening it would be to raise children in a gun-obsessed nation. My step-daughters go to school in a borderline-rural suburb, whereas I was educated in central Seattle. They already know of at least one friend-of-a-friend who was killed in a school shooting. Many of their friends’ parents are gun owners. Not only that, but, over the past few decades, the National Rifle Association has been aggressively and successfully rolling back firearm restrictions, making gun ownership as quick and easy for anyone’s irresponsible, drunk cousin as their meticulous, gun-safety-trained dad. When we send our kids to friends’ houses for sleepovers, it sometimes feels like a leap of faith.

In the US in 2015, more people were shot and killed by toddlers than by terrorists. In 2013, the New York Times reported on children shot by other children: “Children shot accidentally – usually by other children – are collateral casualties of the accessibility of guns in America, their deaths all the more devastating for being eminently preventable.”

And I’m supposed to believe that frightened Syrian refugees – or whomever becomes the next rightwing scapegoat du jour – are the real threat to my children? I’m supposed to be afraid of sharks? Heavy metal music? Violent video games? Horse meat in my hamburger patties? Teenagers pouring vodka up their butts?

States with more guns have more gun deaths. Keeping a gun in your house increases your chances of accidental death by shooting, but does not make you safer. A woman’s chance of being murdered by an abusive partner increases fivefold if the partner has access to a gun. “Good guys with guns” are a fantasy. How much longer will we keep participating in this great collective lie that deadly weapons keep us safe?

**** Read the complete article on The Guardian newspaper here. ****

Gun TV home shopping channel plans to open in US in 2016. Honest.

A new home shopping channel will launch in the US early in 2016. It will be called, simply, Gun TV.

TV home shopping is synonymous with flashy jewelry, home décor and bargain accessories you never knew you needed. But Gun TV’s specialty will be exactly that: guns. It will also sell ammunition, accessories such as concealed-carry holsters and clothing, such as hunting jackets.

“We saw an opportunity in filling a need, not creating one,” Valerie Castle, one of the co-founders of the channel, told the Guardian. “The vast majority of people who own and use guns in this country, whether it’s home protection, recreation or hunting, are responsible.

“I don’t really know that it’s going to put more guns on the streets.”

Castle and her husband, Doug Bornstein, have spent long careers as consultants or executives in the television home shopping industry. They now plan to market “a broad range of the most in-demand products in the firearms market”, Castle said.

The channel had been planned for launch in time for the 2015 post-Thanksgiving and pre-Christmas shopping bonanza.

But a series of delays – about which Castle did not go into detail – have pushed the launch date to 20 January 2016. The channel will go live via national satellite and cable television providers.

Read the complete article here on The Guardian newspaper web site.