Don’t bring a moral argument to a gunfight, Jonathan Metzl tells liberals in new book

That Nashville Waffle House shooting — when four people were killed after a gunman opened fire with an assault weapon in 2018 — provides the framework for Jonathan Metzl’s “What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms.” On the Shelf What We’ve Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms By Jonathan M. Metzl W. W. Norton & Company: 384 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org, whose fees support independent bookstores. In the book, Metzl argues that Nashville’s lack of quality public transit or bike lanes, compared to Brooklyn’s, is linked to the differences in gun laws in red states that have a “murder problem” that dwarfs blue states; red states, he writes, also tend to have worse health care and worse health outcomes. Inc. vs. Bruen that further loosened gun laws, where he imagined, Metzl says “the Black mugger who’s around every corner, so everybody has to be guarded by them.” That case will just be the starting point if Donald Trump regains the presidency, Metzl says, adding that conservative judges’ overturning of the will of the voters on gun safety issues is already “incredibly antidemocratic.” “It’s going to get a lot worse,” he continues. “I don’t think that somebody like me is going to convince somebody with an AR-15 to put their name in a government database for background checks.” But, ultimately, he says liberals need to stop making the public health argument for reform and regulation and focus on gaining political control, a concept he says applies not just to the gun debate but to liberal ideals in general.