Three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Mike McIntire delivers the definitive story of the forces that shape gun culture and the American way of violence.
It wasn't that long ago when you could still envision a future for America not marked by gun idolatry, blood-stained classrooms, and empty offers of thoughts and prayers. Yet a witches' brew of politics, money and ideology warped gun culture in the United States, hijacking the Second Amendment and opening the door to reckless marketing of powerful weapons driven by fear and insecurity. How did our country come to have more guns than people, and where just pulling into the wrong driveway can get you shot?
In Ricochet, Mike McIntire provides a bold new roadmap for understanding our fraught relationship with guns and violence in America. It is a gripping narrative of how the imperatives of war, slavery, crime, commerce and politics intertwined with the development of ever-more lethal firearms that left the country divided and traumatized. McIntire will reveal explosive new revelations about the NRA's accumulation of power and turn to radicalism; Wall Street's efforts to turbocharge the market for assault weapons and online gun sales; the gun lobby's secretive campaign to change public attitudes by indoctrinating children; and how dark money, questionable scholarship and front groups are being used to knock down gun laws. It is, at once, a cautionary tale of unfettered liberty, swagger and free markets contributing to our violent undoing-and a prescription for how we might yet save ourselves.
A work of deep, revelatory investigative reporting, powerful storytelling, and incisive analysis, Ricochet is in essence a story about America, an excavation of the cultural and political dynamics that are at the root of our contemporary crises.
