"America's war over gun control has raged since the 1960s. In 2008, the Supreme Court startled the left by concluding that with the Second Amendment the founders elevated "above all other interests" the right to bear arms "in defense of hearth and home." Liberals feared the NRA would succeed in rolling back regulations nationwide. Discussion about guns in America has been stalemated, shortcircuited, and dominated by rigidly and mutually intolerant ideologies. Yet we may be closer to a solution than either side may imagine.In Living With Guns, veteran New York Times editor Craig Whitney carefully reexamines America's relationship with guns, showing how guns are an important part of American culture. The earliest colonists needed them to survive. We have nearly 300 million of them today. Trying to restrict gun ownership doesn't effectively deter crime--we need to get serious about what actually works. Whitney shows that, if we focus on controlling violence rather than guns themselves, the Second Amendment may not be so lethal as the left would like to think"-- Provided by publisher.

Newtown. Columbine. Virginia Tech. Tucson. Aurora. Gun violence on a massive scale has become a plague in our society, yet politicians seem more afraid of having a serious conversation about guns than they are of the next horrific shooting. Any attempt to change the status quo, whether to strengthen gun regulations or weaken them, is sure to degenerate into a hysteria that changes nothing. Our attitudes toward guns are utterly polarized, leaving basic questions unasked: How can we reconcile the individual right to own and use firearms with the right to be safe from gun violence? Is keeping guns out of the hands of as many law-abiding Americans as possible really the best way to keep them out of the hands of criminals? And do 30,000 of us really have to die by gunfire every year as the price of a freedom protected by the Constitution? Craig R. Whitney, former editor at the New York Times, seeks out answers. He re-examines why the right to bear arms was enshrined in the Bill of Rights, and how it came to be misunderstood. He looks to colonial times, surveying the degree to which guns were a part of everyday life. Finally, blending history and reportage, Whitney explores how twentieth-century turmoil and culture war led to today's climate of activism, partisanship, and stalemate, in a nation that contains an estimated 300 million guns -- and probably at least 60 million gun owners. In the end, Whitney proposes a new way forward through our gun rights stalemate, showing how we can live with guns -- and why, with so many of them around, we have no other choice.