Jonathan M. Metzl Profile picture
Oct 1, 2020 3 tweets 1 min read Read on X
As president of everyone, your job is to help fund and fix the postal service for everyone. As president of everyone, your job is to get healthcare for everyone. As president of everyone, your job is to assure quality education...for everyone. #WithBidenWeCan
As president, inequity and injustice represent a challenge--to address inequity and injustice for the benefit of...everyone, not to manipulate divisions in ways that set people and communities against each other. #WithBidenWeCan
As president during a pandemic, your job is to assure that no one is safe until everyone is safe, unify your country against a common threat, and build structures that protect us against future pandemics. #WithBidenWeCan

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More from @JonathanMetzl

Jan 30
Today is launch day for WHAT WE’VE BECOME: LIVING AND DYING IN A COUNTRY OF ARMS.

The book begins in the early morning hours of April 22 2018, when a naked white man with an AR-15 burst into a Nashville Waffle House and shot and killed four young adults of color. I spent five years learning everything about the case – reading police reports, interviewing families, going to court hearings, studying how a man with a highly lethal gun ended up at a Waffle House, and what happened after he left.

My research changed much of what I thought I knew about #gunviolence in #America and the best ways to prevent it. #WhatWeBecome started as a book about #guns – and evolved into a terrifying, infuriating, and
exceedingly unexpected story about race, politics, and sanity in the US South.

#tnpoli #gunsafety #WhatWeveBecome @wwnorton @McKinnonLit
Mass shootings happen so frequently in the US that we’ve tragically normalized them - even the worst shootings stay in the news for just a few days.

But looking in depth at a single event, led me to a startling realization: while experts like me have built a knowledge base around the horrific mortal effects of firing guns, we have done not nearly enough research into the meanings of guns never fired, or the social and political meanings of owning guns and carrying them. That blind spot has profound implications on many levels – from the inability to define and defend the American public square, to difficulties stopping once unimaginable expansions in gun sales, to the problems health-based arguments counter in refuting even the most extreme public carry laws.

My reading of the Waffle House tragedy ultimately leads me to the conclusion that guns represent more than health problems: they are problems of race, of history, of plurality. They are precursors to authoritarianism. Yet the prevention frameworks through which Democrats and liberals often understand guns can block recognition of these larger issues—with huge implications for the 2024 election and beyond. And that it’s time to change course – by broadening our alliances, supporting what I call gun-safety entrepreneurialism, and following the lead of activists and researchers who join gun safety with investments in lived environment.

huffpost.com/entry/opinion-…
I’m so looking forward to talking about these ideas in different locales across the country. More dets about the tour (so far!) appear at, , including stops at @nyu_ipk (with @ahylton26), @HarvardBooks, @PoliticsProse , and many others... jonathanmetzl.com/events
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Read 16 tweets
Jun 23, 2022
Dont think ppl have fully grasped implications of horrible #SCOTUS #gun decision. "As of today, in order to be constitutional, any such law must have a specific historical precedent from the 18th or early-19th century." Ie the end of modern gun control.

nymag.com/intelligencer/…
As @voxdotcom @imillhiser puts it: “The future of gun control in the United States could be quite grim—and Bruen could mark the moment when lawmakers’ power to fight gun violence falls apart.” vox.com/2021/4/26/2236…
#SCOTUS undercut a central tenet of the anti-gun-violence movement—namely that people who live in towns, cities, and states should have the right to set laws and policies that work best for them. bostonreview.net/articles/the-s…
Read 5 tweets
Oct 30, 2021
Loosening gun policies in Missouri went hand-in-hand with the loss of over ten thousand and five hundred years of productive male life in the state between 2008 and 2015....
Between 2008-2015, a person in Missouri was 11x more likely to die by gun suicide than in an accidental house fire, and 14.5x more likely to die by gun suicide than by “natural/environmental” causes ranging from...
...death by flood, earthquake, tornado, falling from a ladder, electrocution, smoke inhalation, or after being bitten by a dog.....
Read 18 tweets
Oct 10, 2020
For anyone wondering why Trump would even consider holding a WH balcony serenade while he remains infected and infectious...the #DyingOfWhiteness reason would be, yet again, that he drives and is driven by the politics of racial resentment.....
By this logic, signaling his devotion to a hierarchy that keeps white people on top is more important then what might seem from the outside like self interest or communal well-being....
So while many wonder why Trump can hold another WH rally even when he has/embodies Covid-it’s sending a very particular message about whiteness and white America that he assumes a more powerful message for his supporters than what might seem from the outside like self interest...
Read 11 tweets
Oct 4, 2020
Core Trump base no more likely to start wearing masks than they are to support healthcare reform, saving the planet, gun safety, etc. Rather, getting #COVID19 now takes on new political meaning--becomes an expression of self-sacrifice and a way of showing devotion to the cause.
To put it another way, getting and transmitting #COVID19 is the 'logical' next phase of not wearing masks. Public health becomes politicized and weaponized for the cause.
Getting and transmitting #COVID19 then becomes a way of being like Trump, showing resistance, devotion, sacrifice.
Read 7 tweets
Sep 26, 2020
We need a leader who will flip the switch on divisive rhetoric, and who sees our diversity as our superpower @MarkRuffalo #WithBidenWeCan
I grew up in Missouri. I’ve seen neighbors and communities work together in common cause! It’s preposterous to think we can’t do so again when faced with these monumental challenges
Fight back against a system that sees our differences as political opportunities
Read 6 tweets

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