Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence

Three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Mike McIntire delivers the definitive story of the forces that shape gun culture and the American way of violence.

Not too long ago, you could still envision a future for America not marked by gun idolatry, blood-stained classrooms, and empty offers of thoughts and prayers. Yet a witches’ brew of politics, money, and ideology has warped gun culture in the United States, hijacking the Second Amendment and allowing fear and insecurity to drive the reckless marketing of powerful weapons. How did our country come to have more guns than people and become one in which just pulling into the wrong driveway can get you shot?

In Ricochet, Mike McIntire provides a bold new road map for understanding our fraught relationship with guns and violence in America. McIntire crafts a gripping narrative of how the imperatives of war, slavery, crime, commerce and politics intertwined with the development of ever-more lethal firearms, leaving the country divided and traumatized. He shares explosive new revelations about the NRA’s accumulation of power and turn to radicalism; Wall Street's efforts to turbocharge the market for assault weapons and online gun sales; the gun lobby’s secretive campaign to change public attitudes by indoctrinating children; and how dark money, questionable scholarship, and front groups are being used to knock down gun laws. At once a cautionary tale of unfettered liberty, swagger and free markets contributing to our violent undoing, Ricochet also delivers a prescription for how we might yet save ourselves.

A work of deep, revelatory investigative reporting, powerful storytelling, and incisive analysis, Ricochet is in essence a story about America, an excavation of the cultural and political dynamics that are at the root of our contemporary crises.