Join Thom Wednesday, June 12: PORTLAND, OR 7:30pm Location: Powell’s, 1005 W Burnside St., Portland

Mass shootings are on the rise. The call for gun control is at a fever pitch. And a recent Quinnipiac University poll shows that the majority of Americans support stricter gun laws. So what’s holding the U.S. back from enacting change?

In The Hidden History of Guns and the Second Amendment (Berrett-Koehler Publishers; June 4, 2019; 9781523085996), nationally syndicated talk show host and New York Times bestselling author Thom Hartmann offers an in-depth, historically informed view of the role guns have played throughout American history, from early European settlement to the Revolutionary War and Manifest Destiny, through the use of Slave Patrols in the Deep South (which became the "well-regulated militias" so debated in 1787), to the recent school massacres. He shows how the NRA and conservative Supreme Court justices used specious logic to invent a virtually unlimited individual right to own guns, which has enabled the ever-growing number of mass shootings in the United States.

There are solutions to this epidemic of gun violence and mass shootings, but they require a clear eyed reconciliation of America’s past with its present. Hartmann identifies common-sense and powerful solutions that would break the power of the gun lobby and restore the understanding of the Second Amendment that the Framers of the Constitution intended, such as:

• getting money out of politics to get the NRA out of lobbying

• passing laws that would treat gun ownership like car ownership (title, license, insurance)

• addressing the social despair and economic inequality that drive violent crime and mass shootings