ABC News spoke with historian and author Dominic Erdozain about his new book, 'One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy.'
Author Dominic Erdozain was motivated to write his book, "One Nation Under Guns: How Gun Culture Distorts Our History and Threatens Our Democracy," because he felt that there was not enough awareness about gun violence. His book takes readers through a journey of American history, exploring the evolution of gun culture and its significant impact on the nation's values, norms and democracy.
And then there's this rumbling, continuation of violence in our communities, causing lockdowns in schools. It happened in my doctor's surgery here in Atlanta last year. And I felt that there just wasn't awareness of either the scale of it or how recent or how new much of it was. And it's almost like for Reagan, a continuation of, the war against the Evil Empire. It's like the home front of that. And once you take guns out of the realm of the practical into this symbolic sphere, or at least invest them with more symbolic value than they ever had before, they become almost untouchable. So yeah, that's the start of the sort of revolution, really, the 1980s.
So this is this is a drastic change. And I think that it changes things on the legal level obviously. But I think also there's a kind of acceptance that this is the way it was. Whereas you go back as recently as the first decade of this century and 1990s, people are kind of scoffing at the idea that the right to bear arms in the military, in the, in the state militia has any bearing on the individual. But that's quickly lost.
ERDOZAIN: Well, it's such an illusion. I sometimes think that the bad guy is just a good guy who's having a bad day.
ABC NEWS LIVE: Yeah. And there were a lot of people after the Uvalde mass shooting, they pointed out there were a lot of good guys with guns, standing around for quite some time. Well, that was happening so that goes to your point. I'm just wondering, after doing all this research and writing this book, where do you believe, what place do guns have in a functioning democracy? Do you believe?
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