Disproportionately who is more often the target of the firearms globally as well as domestically? Who do we think of when we think of the “armed citizen” that the NRA has been celebrating for approximately a century? Who are those heroic armed citizens that we picture when we imagine the good citizenship of self-care that involves firearms? We are literally killing ourselves in this nation because of our love affair with these firearms and the mythology that they're going to make us safer.

Caroline Light joins us to discuss her book, Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense. A 10th anniversary edition with a new introduction and a preface by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is now available from Beacon Press.

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Guest

Caroline Light

Caroline Light is a Senior Lecturer and the Director of Undergraduate Studies in WGS. Her research explores histories of citizenship and belonging in the United States, including how Jewish immigrants created a web of benevolent organizations in the South. Light's first book, That Pride of Race and Character: the Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South (NYU Press, 2014) tells the stories of Jewish orphans raised in institutions that lifted them from poverty to prosperity. Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense (Beacon Press, 2017) tracks the evolution of our nation’s ideals of armed citizenship, from the centuries-old “castle doctrine” to the “Stand Your Ground” laws that have removed the duty to retreat in a majority of the states. A ten-year anniversary edition of Stand Your Ground - with a Preface by historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz - is available from Beacon Press.

White America's Attachment to Lethal Self-Defense / Caroline Light

Caroline Light