Welcome to this throwback edition of the award-winning Best of the Left podcast, where we

remember the past and choose to repeat it. The show is on a brief hiatus while we take a much-needed

vacation. On this vacation, I'm doing some exploring and camping in the old West, the kinds of

places that are the heart of the old gun culture

in America. You know, where homesteading required the use of guns as a tool to protect life and

livestock from predators and potentially from the native peoples whose land they were living on

and whose buffalo they were

slaughtering as a form of starvation war. The point is that the frontier helped make guns into a

quintessentially American symbol of self-reliance and survival. So why didn't the gun culture

die out at about the same time as the closing of the frontier when it had been

basically fully settled by descendants of Europeans. Learn that story, among others,

from this episode from June 2022 on the history and present of gun ownership and gun violence in the

U.S. And now, to look back with an eye on the future, sources today include counterspend,

All In with Chris Hayes, The Daily Show, the Tom Hartman program, the PBS News Hour,

Letters and Politics, Breaking the Sound Barrier, and Citations needed.

Other questions, And citations needed. Other countries have misogyny and racism, untreated mental illness, and bar fights, and robberies.

What they don't have are weeks like the one we saw in March of 2021, in which Americans, just reeling from the

murders of eight people in Atlanta, woke up to news of 10 people killed in Boulder, Colorado.

It's the guns. The difference is the guns. We asked for help thinking about that from Iger Volski, Executive Director of

Guns Down America, and author of the book Guns Down, How to Defeat the NRA and Build a Safer

Future with fewer guns. I started by noting the journalistic and maybe just human tendency

in the wake of a mass shooting horror like

...