Basic Pistol

If there is one area in the American gun debate where there is widespread agreement it is this: firearms training is a good thing. Across America, firearms instructors are teaching an increasingly large and diverse group of Americans how to use a gun. But who are these firearms instructors? And what are people learning from them? And how does it explain the gun violence we are seeing played out on a daily basis?

Basic Pistol takes us to the front lines of American gun culture: the place where people learn to kill.

Starting with a popular shooting course called Basic Pistol, Harel Shapira, a sociologist at the University of Texas, has spent ten years immersed in the world of gun-training culture. Now, in this groundbreaking book, he takes a deep dive into how Americans train their minds and bodies to use guns and finds that people who live in some of the safest neighbourhoods in America are learning to navigate every moment of their lives with a sense that they are in constant danger. He reveals that, far from 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 an armed society is not a polite society, as the NRA would have it. It is not a society at all. And 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.