Where?

Tuesday 22nd October
Arts 250
4-6PM
Refreshments provided!

Discussion

In this session we look at the increasingly pertinent, and contentious, issues surrounding American gun ownership, control, and reform. How realistic is Democratic campaigner Beto O’Rouke’s claim he is going buy back America’s AR-15 assault rifles? How has the incendiary and violent rhetoric of Trump’s administration affected attitudes to gun ownership? We will unpack this unceasing debate in American cultural with a fresh perspective, and consider the arguments both for and against America’s most hotly contested constitutional amendment.

In Cynthia Deitle Leonardatos’s introduction, she considers authoritarian responses to gun control when weapons fall into the hands of civil rights activists. The question of who is eligible to own a gun in America seems to many to be one of the stronghold ideologies of American patriotism and racism; using this reading, we’ll unpack this further.

In the second ‘reading’, we’ll analyse the rhetoric used in Charlton Heston’s infamous NRA speech, known colloquially as the ‘Cold Dead hands’ speech’. What does it mean to be an American patriot, and how inextricable is gun ownership in such an image?

Reading

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