I'm Bill Moyers. It's good to have your ear. This week on Moorers & Company.

In the year since the massacre at Newtown, Connecticut,

194 more children have been killed by guns. The historian Richard Slotkin talks with me about

how America became the gunfighter nation. We're a nation of laws. That's laws of the guarantors of our liberties.

If your rights depend on your possession of a firearm, then your rights end when you meet somebody

with more bullets or who's a better shot or is meaner than you are.

It's not all men are created equal by their nature.

It's that I am more equal than others because I've got extra shots. If I have six shots in my gun and you've got one, I can outvote you by five shots.

Thanks for joining us.

Be forewarned, a few scenes in this hour are disturbing because we're dealing with violence

and don't want to hide what is true about it.

As you know, one year ago this weekend, 20 schoolchildren and six educators were massacred

at the Sandy Hook Elementary School. The killer also murdered his mother and then killed

himself, 28 deaths in all from guns. Across America, perhaps as many as 30,000 more have

been killed since that fatal day. This is why I've asked Richard Slotkin to

join me. He has spent his adult life delving into how violence took deep root in our culture

from colonial days to now. In his magisterial trilogy, regeneration through violence, the fatal

environment, and gunfighter nation, Richard Slotkin tells

how America came to embrace a mythology of gun-slinging settlers, taming the wilderness

to justify and romanticize a tragic record of subjugation and bloodshed. His latest book,

The Long Road to Antietam, tells the story of the bloodiest day in American

history.

...