Basic Pistol

'Utterly brilliant . . . deeply researched and thoughtful' - Justin Webb, former BBC North America Editor This eye-opening encounter with American gun culture reveals the devastating effects of how people are training their minds and bodies to use guns. Every day, at firearms schools all across the country, Americans are learning how to use a gun. Who are their teachers? What are they being taught? To answer these questions, Harel Shapira, a sociologist at the University of Texas, has spent ten years immersed in the world of gun-training. Throughout the dozens of classes he has taken, and thousands of shots he has fired, he has been taught that the world is filled with ‘bad guys’ who can only be stopped by the self-styled ‘good guys’. He has learned that he must be prepared to kill or be killed, a division that lies the heart of the gun violence that’s now playing out on a daily basis. Shapira reveals that far from simply teaching the mechanics of gun safety these schools are teaching a way of living in the world that is rooted in racist fears, aggressive masculinity and an entitlement to violence. In storytelling that will take your breath away, we discover that the risk of widespread gun ownership is not simply the possibility of more gun violence and mass shootings. The risk is to the very foundations of democracy itself.