Jackson Free Press logo

This story originally appeared in the Jackson Free Press. It was added to the Mississippi Free Press website in 2025.
Note that any opinions expressed in legacy Jackson Free Press stories do not reflect a position of the Mississippi Free Press or necessarily of its staff and board members.

Reason magazine features a compendium of arguments on gun control this issue:

When it comes to rancorous debates in which the two sides routinely talk past each other, gun control ranks up there with abortion and the death penalty. Last year Abigail A. Kohn, an anthropologist trained at the University of California at San Francisco, bravely waded into this battle with Shooters: Myths and Realities of America’s Gun Cultures (Oxford University Press). A sympathetic portrait of gun enthusiasts in Northern California, the book ends with a plea for a calmer discussion of guns and crime. Reason asked Kohn to summarize her argument and invited responses from three people with an interest in this area: civil liberties lawyer Don B. Kates, journalist Wendy Kaminer, and law professor Michael I. Krauss.

Kohn writes:

When the Department of Justice issues a public statement that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to own a gun, when 35 states pass nondiscretionary carry permit laws, when New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof declares that “gun control is dead,” you know the gun debate is over.

But somebody forgot to tell the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and Pizza Hut. Fresh from championing the rights of gays and lesbians to get married, San Francisco’s supervisors are trying to curb the rights of all city residents to keep handguns in their homes. Meanwhile, major American corporations such as Pizza Hut and AOL forbid employees to bring even legally owned and transported guns onto company property or to carry them on the job. Pizza Hut recently fired an employee for carrying a gun while delivering pizzas; the company learned of the violation when the employee used the gun on the job to defend himself during a robbery attempt.

Much more at the full link.

Founding Editor Donna Ladd is a writer, journalist and editor from Philadelphia, Miss., a graduate of Mississippi State University and later the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, where she was an alumni award recipient in 2021. She writes about racism/whiteness, poverty, gender, violence, journalism and the criminal justice system. She contributes long-form features and essays to The Guardian when she has time, and was the co-founder and editor-in-chief of the Jackson Free Press. She co-founded the statewide nonprofit Mississippi Free Press with Kimberly Griffin in March 2020, and the Mississippi Business Journal named her one of the state's top CEOs in 2024. Read more at donnaladd.com, follow her on Twitter and Instagram at @donnerkay and email her at donna@mississippifreepress.org.