“You didn’t have to look someone in the eye while you extinguished their life, and you could do it from a distance.” — Mike McIntire on what the gun changed

Is there an American way of violence? Earlier this month, the film critic David Thomson blamed gory Hollywood movies, like Coppola’s Godfather, for glorifying it. Today’s guest has an even more brutal answer. According to Mike McIntire, the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times investigative journalist, it’s the gun itself that can be blamed for the perpetual American plague of violence.

Yes, the gun did it. In his new book Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence, McIntire observes that every developed country has violent movies, violent video games, and significant mental illness. But what no other country has are schoolchildren, grocery shoppers, and churchgoers massacred on a regular basis. Up to forty thousand Americans die from guns every year — half of them suicides — and yet we treat these uniquely dangerous machines as if they were iPhones.

How did this catastrophe happen? McIntire’s answer focuses on the law as much as the culture. English common law imposed a duty to retreat in the event of conflict. Then, amid the centennial jingoism of 1876, an Indiana court declared that “retreat” was not “the tendency of the American mind.” A “true man,” explained an Ohio court, doesn’t fly from threats. Stand your ground was born — and with it, a legal redefinition of what it means to be an American.

And then there’s the NRA — founded in 1871, ironically, by a former New York Times correspondent as a marksmanship club, and radicalized a century later. Its greatest coup was reframing the Second Amendment from militia clause into individual right — a maneuver that Warren Burger, a Republican chief justice, called the “biggest fraud” ever perpetrated on the American people. And today even the NRA looks moderate compared to new online radical right-wing gun rights groups.

McIntire, a gun owner himself, doesn’t preach. Instead he describes his first murder scene as a young cop reporter — the dead man peacefully lying in the grass, one small round hole in the side of his head. Clean, efficient, clinical. Like an iPhone app. That’s the American way of violence. The gun did it. And will continue to do so until America retreats from its deadly love affair with the firearm.

Five Takeaways

• It’s the Gun Itself. Every country has violent movies and mental illness; only America has regular massacres. Forty thousand gun deaths a year — and guns treated like iPhones.

• A Daily Trickle of Bloodshed. Two hundred dead in a plane crash brings a national response; the same toll in scattered shootings brings silence. Acceptable losses.

• No Duty to Retreat. Common law required retreat; centennial-era courts ruled retreat un-American — a “true man” doesn’t fly. Stand your ground became canon.

• “The Biggest Fraud.” The NRA’s long game recast the Second Amendment from militia clause to individual right — Chief Justice Warren Burger’s word for it: fraud.

• The Death Star Eclipsed. McIntire’s internal NRA documents trace its radicalization — and no-compromise groups like the Firearms Policy Coalition now outflank it.

About Keen On America

Nobody asks more awkward questions than the Anglo-American writer and filmmaker Andrew Keen.

Website: https://keenon.tv/ Substack: https://keenon.substack.com/ YouTube: https://youtube.com/@KeenOnShow

Buy Ricochet: simonandschuster.com/books/Ricochet/Mike-McIntire/9781668063064

Chapters:

00:00:31 Introduction: is there an American way of violence?
00:02:24 Movies, video games, mental health — or the gun itself?
00:04:56 Beyond Parkland and Sandy Hook
00:05:31 A daily trickle of bloodshed: the plane crash analogy
00:06:53 Jessica Mitford and the American way of death
00:07:35 Stand your ground vs the duty to retreat
00:10:48 Culture, colonies, and the law
00:11:22 1876: jingoism codified — the "true man" doctrine
00:13:01 Did the Civil War flood America with guns?
00:13:58 The repeating rifle changes everything
00:16:29 What makes Ricochet different
00:16:54 A gun owner with three Pulitzers
00:17:21 The cop reporter and the body in the grass
00:19:33 The NRA: greed or ideology?
00:20:07 Internal documents: the path to radicalization
00:21:17 From marksmanship to militancy: Dingell and the seventies
00:22:48 Is the Second Amendment argument credible?
00:23:15 Standing armies and well regulated militias
00:26:01 The AR-15 and the common use test
00:28:38 Groups to the right of the NRA
00:29:12 The Firearms Policy Coalition and "no compromise"
00:31:10 The death star eclipsed
00:31:34 Cage matches, gun influencers, and troubled young men
00:32:45 Lessons from Prohibition?
00:34:13 Americans don’t like bans
00:36:07 The NRA as a model for its enemies
00:36:54 The abortion parallel: the long game
00:37:38 The third rail: Beto O’Rourke’s lesson
00:39:27 Thanks and goodbye