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What We've Become: Living and Dying in a Country of Arms
A searing reflection on the broken promise of safety in America. When a naked, mentally ill white man with an AR-15 killed four young adults of color at a nearby Waffle House, Nashville-based physician and gun policy scholar Dr. Jonathan M. Metzl once again advocated for commonsense gun reform. But as he peeled back evidence surrounding the racially charged mass shooting, a shocking question Did the approach he championed have it all wrong? Long a leading expert at the forefront of a movement advocating for gun reform as a matter of public health, Dr. Metzl has been on constant media call in the aftermath of fatal shootings. But the 2018 Nashville killings led him on a path toward recognizing the limitations of biomedical frameworks for fully diagnosing or treating the impassioned complexities of American gun politics. Increasingly, as Dr. Metzl came to understand it, public health is a harder sell in a nation that fundamentally disagrees about what it means to be safe, healthy, or free. This brilliant, piercing analysis shows mass shootings as a symptom of our most unresolved national conflicts. What We've Become ultimately sets us on the path of alliance-forging, racial-reckoning, and political power-brokering we must take to put things right.
384 pages, Hardcover
Published January 30, 2024
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About the author
Jonathan M. Metzl
15 books148 followersProfessor and Director of the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University; a Psychiatrist; and the Research Director of The Safe Tennessee Project, a non-partisan, volunteer-based organization that is concerned with gun-related injuries and fatalities in America and in Tennessee.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
December 20, 2023
I loved Metzl's previous book, Dying of Whiteness, so I was very excited to get an advanced copy of this book. Unfortunately I don't think it came together nearly as well. I felt like he was undercutting his own points. The premise of the books seems to be about how anti-gun lobbyists generally take a public health messaging angle and why that doesn't break through to the people who actually own guns because they are looking at it from an entirely different angle and that basically everyone is just talking past each other. That seemed to be the setup to me, so I was expecting the second half of the book to talk about how to bridge that gap and actually try and make real in-roads on gun reform. Instead it felt like all he did was dig into the public health messaging even though the whole premise earlier was that it doesn't work. He clearly states multiple times is what he's rooted in, and it seems like he's struggling himself to present any messaging beyond it. I thought it might be a useful book, but ultimately I don't think it had much to offer.
July 3, 2024
How do I put a star rating on a book whose information tears at my gut? The facts were well researched. The conclusions were nebulous. What can be done? No clear answers here.
The story followed a mass shooting in a Waffle House in Nashville, TN in April, 2018. Four people were killed and injured two others. The shooter was a 29-year old originally from Illinois who moved to Tennessee because of its less stringent gun laws.
I'll learned much about the laws in our country and the disturbing conclusions that are often drawn after these mass shootings.
The fact that this book was published is, in itself, a positive - a hope of opening dialogue, not just discussion. I'll try to keep that in mind rather than be depressed by the loosening and ignoring of gun laws presently on the books and challenged in our courts.
The story followed a mass shooting in a Waffle House in Nashville, TN in April, 2018. Four people were killed and injured two others. The shooter was a 29-year old originally from Illinois who moved to Tennessee because of its less stringent gun laws.
I'll learned much about the laws in our country and the disturbing conclusions that are often drawn after these mass shootings.
The fact that this book was published is, in itself, a positive - a hope of opening dialogue, not just discussion. I'll try to keep that in mind rather than be depressed by the loosening and ignoring of gun laws presently on the books and challenged in our courts.
June 24, 2024
It just wasn’t compellingly written to me. Sadly I was mostly bored.
February 18, 2024
In the early morning hours on April 22, 2018 a shooting occurred at a local waffle house in Tennessee. Four young people of color lost their lives and the shooter, a young, naked below the waist white man with a history of mental illness named Travis Reinken, would open yet another national debate on the role of guns in American society.
What separates this book from an avalanche of titles on mass shootings in America is that asks why there is stark contrast between attitudes about guns between “blue states” and “red states” and how this misunderstandings seem to simply entrench existing attitudes rather than open any real dialogue.
I learned quite a bit here about recent American history regarding guns.
The Dickey Amendment (heavily lobbied for by the NRA) in 1996 for example, which prohibited any federally funded research into the effects of gun violence or safety, had a disastrous effect on what we know about how to prevent mass shootings. What little information we have today is primarily funded by “blue state” organizations who are unfamiliar with “red state” gun culture and therefore are largely preaching to the converted.
The author argues that this research, which primarily comes from a public health perspective falls on deaf ears in such states where there is widespread mistrust of government health policies, particularly in the aftermath of Covid.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this book though (besides the alarming trend across the nation to, in the face of ever increasing mass shootings, actually remove restrictions on permits, training, and background checks) is just how easy it was for Travis Reinken to get a gun. Even living in a state like Illinois which had strict gun laws where the system more or less worked when police came to seize his guns, the system broke down when they gave them to his father with the promise that he would not return them to his son. Which he shortly did.
The system broke down further when Travis drove into Tennessee which has virtually no restrictions on gun ownership, where the killings would occur.
The author rightly asks what such a patchwork of gun laws can really do to prevent the next shooting if one can simply take their guns from one state that outlaws them to another that lets them have virtual freedom with them.
We have not always been this country. As the author points out, the mass shooting phenomenon is something relatively new within the last 20 years or so. There was a time when the communal safety of not having people openly brandishing weapons was valued more than the rights of people to intimidate each other. Perhaps we can reclaim these spaces for each other. Hopefully before too many more people have to senselessly die.
What separates this book from an avalanche of titles on mass shootings in America is that asks why there is stark contrast between attitudes about guns between “blue states” and “red states” and how this misunderstandings seem to simply entrench existing attitudes rather than open any real dialogue.
I learned quite a bit here about recent American history regarding guns.
The Dickey Amendment (heavily lobbied for by the NRA) in 1996 for example, which prohibited any federally funded research into the effects of gun violence or safety, had a disastrous effect on what we know about how to prevent mass shootings. What little information we have today is primarily funded by “blue state” organizations who are unfamiliar with “red state” gun culture and therefore are largely preaching to the converted.
The author argues that this research, which primarily comes from a public health perspective falls on deaf ears in such states where there is widespread mistrust of government health policies, particularly in the aftermath of Covid.
Perhaps the most disturbing aspect of this book though (besides the alarming trend across the nation to, in the face of ever increasing mass shootings, actually remove restrictions on permits, training, and background checks) is just how easy it was for Travis Reinken to get a gun. Even living in a state like Illinois which had strict gun laws where the system more or less worked when police came to seize his guns, the system broke down when they gave them to his father with the promise that he would not return them to his son. Which he shortly did.
The system broke down further when Travis drove into Tennessee which has virtually no restrictions on gun ownership, where the killings would occur.
The author rightly asks what such a patchwork of gun laws can really do to prevent the next shooting if one can simply take their guns from one state that outlaws them to another that lets them have virtual freedom with them.
We have not always been this country. As the author points out, the mass shooting phenomenon is something relatively new within the last 20 years or so. There was a time when the communal safety of not having people openly brandishing weapons was valued more than the rights of people to intimidate each other. Perhaps we can reclaim these spaces for each other. Hopefully before too many more people have to senselessly die.
May 11, 2024
In What We've Become Dr. Jonathan Metzl makes a powerful case for re-thinking increasingly unsuccessful approaches to gun control. Metzl, a doctor and public health scholar at Vanderbilt University, weaves a structural analysis of the country's evolution on gun laws with a very personal story of a mass shooting that occured in Antioch, Tennessee (just south of Nashville) in 2018. While the juxtaposition of the structural and personal at times made the arc of this book a bit messy, overall I think it makes for a poignant, grounded examination of what American society has gotten wrong about guns, and the devastating consequences of those mistakes.
Metzl's thesis, in short, is that gun control advocates have treated this issue in a similar fashion to public health campaigns of the past, such as mandating car seatbelts, banning tobacco from public spaces, and other laws that prioritize communal health over individual choice. The problem, he argues, is that guns in America represent so much more than an individual choice that happens to have bad public health consequences. Metzl traces the evolution of gun laws, pro-gun decisions from court justices, and interviews with gun owners to demonstrate that for many gun owners, guns satisfy an existential need for safety - a need that has been amplified by deliberate campaigns from the NRA and other aligned political groups. Indeed, guns have historically been framed as a way for white men to maintain power and a traditional way of life. In this frame, judicial and legislative efforts to curb these freedoms even a little bit - for example, through "common-sense" legislation such as red-flag laws - are seen as a threat to this power. Further, anti-gun control arguments are now mobilized by conservative politicians to accomplish other policy goals, including re-shaping judicial courts, re-districting electoral maps, and achieving legislative supermajorities, and cannot be viewed as its own distinct policy issue.
In his examination of the Antioch shooting, Metzl convincingly demonstrates how these factors came together to allow the shooter, Travis Reinking, to bring assault weapons from his home in Illinois to the Tennessee diner on that fateful night - even though there were multiple laws on the books, and multiple previous encounters with police, that should have resulted in the confiscation of his guns. In both the structural and detailed case analysis, Metzl argues that a new approach accounting for this political and racial economy of guns will be needed to lead to any meaningful reform. And in his poignant, respectful rendering of the lives of the Antioch shooting victims, Metzl reminds us of the fierce urgency of rethinking our approach to public safety to finally get this right.
Metzl's thesis, in short, is that gun control advocates have treated this issue in a similar fashion to public health campaigns of the past, such as mandating car seatbelts, banning tobacco from public spaces, and other laws that prioritize communal health over individual choice. The problem, he argues, is that guns in America represent so much more than an individual choice that happens to have bad public health consequences. Metzl traces the evolution of gun laws, pro-gun decisions from court justices, and interviews with gun owners to demonstrate that for many gun owners, guns satisfy an existential need for safety - a need that has been amplified by deliberate campaigns from the NRA and other aligned political groups. Indeed, guns have historically been framed as a way for white men to maintain power and a traditional way of life. In this frame, judicial and legislative efforts to curb these freedoms even a little bit - for example, through "common-sense" legislation such as red-flag laws - are seen as a threat to this power. Further, anti-gun control arguments are now mobilized by conservative politicians to accomplish other policy goals, including re-shaping judicial courts, re-districting electoral maps, and achieving legislative supermajorities, and cannot be viewed as its own distinct policy issue.
In his examination of the Antioch shooting, Metzl convincingly demonstrates how these factors came together to allow the shooter, Travis Reinking, to bring assault weapons from his home in Illinois to the Tennessee diner on that fateful night - even though there were multiple laws on the books, and multiple previous encounters with police, that should have resulted in the confiscation of his guns. In both the structural and detailed case analysis, Metzl argues that a new approach accounting for this political and racial economy of guns will be needed to lead to any meaningful reform. And in his poignant, respectful rendering of the lives of the Antioch shooting victims, Metzl reminds us of the fierce urgency of rethinking our approach to public safety to finally get this right.
September 26, 2025
4.5/5
I thoroughly enjoyed this book in light of all of the recent events that have happened. Although written in 2024, its themes, like an echo chamber, have been relevant for 2025 and will continue to be relevant afterwords.
I believe that people who did not feel that Metzl encapsulated and explored the problem of gun violence in America with solutions from a public health standpoint, didn’t come into this book with the right mindset. They likely live in blue states, are public health scholars, and were looking for meaningful pubic health practices to combat gun violence. That is not what this book is for. This book digs into the social, political, and racial forces that have shaped, to be on the nose, What We’ve Become, in light of gun violence.
Metzl perfectly describes how it feels to be in a red, gun-locked state: trapped. Suffocated by mounds and mounds of decisions made by one-side of the aisle. Oppressed by decades and decades of attitudes, culture, policies, and identities that have been spread for years, and more than likely will be. He takes the perspective that we do have to incorporate the attitudes and culture of gun-owners, which most other public health professionals miss, unless you were raised within this culture and know is engrained.
I would have liked more to have dug into the sexual identity ties with mass shooters, especially in the current climate that we are in, but that is for a different book, a different time, and different research, that we are years down the line from obtaining. Especially in today’s heightened perspectives.
I know that I will come back to this book in the future, and sadly, will be able to relate to it more and more.
I thoroughly enjoyed this book in light of all of the recent events that have happened. Although written in 2024, its themes, like an echo chamber, have been relevant for 2025 and will continue to be relevant afterwords.
I believe that people who did not feel that Metzl encapsulated and explored the problem of gun violence in America with solutions from a public health standpoint, didn’t come into this book with the right mindset. They likely live in blue states, are public health scholars, and were looking for meaningful pubic health practices to combat gun violence. That is not what this book is for. This book digs into the social, political, and racial forces that have shaped, to be on the nose, What We’ve Become, in light of gun violence.
Metzl perfectly describes how it feels to be in a red, gun-locked state: trapped. Suffocated by mounds and mounds of decisions made by one-side of the aisle. Oppressed by decades and decades of attitudes, culture, policies, and identities that have been spread for years, and more than likely will be. He takes the perspective that we do have to incorporate the attitudes and culture of gun-owners, which most other public health professionals miss, unless you were raised within this culture and know is engrained.
I would have liked more to have dug into the sexual identity ties with mass shooters, especially in the current climate that we are in, but that is for a different book, a different time, and different research, that we are years down the line from obtaining. Especially in today’s heightened perspectives.
I know that I will come back to this book in the future, and sadly, will be able to relate to it more and more.
December 15, 2024
He looks at the waffle house shooting in Tennessee and examines how gun reform has failed and how powerful and right and republican politics have become.
His major point is blue states and the general public have been looking at gun reform as public health and don’t take into account, actual gun owners and their feelings about gun/safety. I was hoping he would do more to bridge this gap or propose reaching out but That was lacking.
At least one start would be repealing. The Dickey amendment and provide funding to look at gun safety again.
His major point is blue states and the general public have been looking at gun reform as public health and don’t take into account, actual gun owners and their feelings about gun/safety. I was hoping he would do more to bridge this gap or propose reaching out but That was lacking.
At least one start would be repealing. The Dickey amendment and provide funding to look at gun safety again.
January 18, 2024
On April 22, 2018, a mostly naked schizophrenic man drove to a Waffle House in Nashville — at an hour when not much other than Waffle House was open. He raised his AR-15 and murdered four people. About three weeks before, he had been fired from his construction job after expressing paranoid delusions about his coworkers, who he had said were "after him." Then he went to a BMW dealership, asked to test-drive an X6, and never returned it. Before that, he posted several videos of himself to YouTube in which he rambled about Taylor Swift, and appeared at a restricted area at the White House and demanded to "inspect the grounds."
Over a year after the murders, Jonathan Metzl appeared on Bill Maher's talk show Real Time. He was promoting his recently released book, Dying of Whiteness. His first words were, "I'm a professor and a doctor." He summarized his book's then-fashionable thesis, that white rural voters are too stupid to understand that Republican policies, including opposition to gun restrictions, work to their detriment. He never mentioned Travis Reinking's murders at the Waffle House.
Nearly six years after the murders, Metzl returns to the bookshelves to give the Waffle House murders the racial angle that broad coverage in national and international media failed to uncover. Despite that neither NPR and CNN saw fit to conclude from the races of the murderer (white) and four victims (black) that Reinking murdered out of racial hatred, Metzl doubts that a clearly manifested and undiagnosed mental illness was the proximate cause of the carnage. Instead, the race-obsessed Metzl psychoanalyzes Reinking — even invoking Freud — and concludes that it was secret racism after all. This is because, and I'm not making this up, when Reinking went to the White House, he said he was a sovereign citizen, and some sovereign citizens are also white supremacists. (Sovereign citizens are not known for entering into deferred prosecution agreements with the government, as Reinking did. A cursory review of traffic stops on YouTube will satisfy the curious viewer of the diversity of folks who say silly things to the police. And I don't mean to sound unkind, but schizophrenics are not always celebrated for their factual accuracy.)
Now, about the only offbeat thing that Travis Reinking did not do was show any evidence of racism, either against his victims or anyone else. Had he done so, the reader can be sure that Metzl would have brought it to his attention. Metzl may shrug at Reinking's schizophrenia, but it takes neither a gun enthusiast or a psychiatrist to see that Reinking's behavior was abnormal. Because of his condition, a judge initially found him incompetent to stand trial — a remarkably difficult finding to make that requires that the defendant is either unable to understand the proceedings, unable to assist his attorneys in defending himself, or both. When a criminal defendant is found incompetent to stand trial, he is ordered to receive psychiatric treatment, whether he likes it or not. Metzl inexplicably withheld this information from his readers. Someone thought Reinking was sick, including a judge, a psychologist who testified in support of his defense that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and probably the prosecution, which declined to seek the death penalty, a decision that was likely influenced by Supreme Court jurisprudence concerning executing the mentally ill, such as Atkins v. Virginia (2002).
A funny thing about this is that my own views on gun reform largely track with Metzl's. But the racism angle was sloppy and slapdash, so that the title does not fit the text. Rather than a level discussion of gun control, this book is unsure of what it tries to be. Of all the cases to showcase as an exemplar of structural racism, Reinking's is an odd choice. According to his website, Metzl seems to study the intersection of guns and race, so maybe it is little wonder that he connects them in What We've Become. I am curious to know how mental-health professionals would react to his opinion that mass shootings should not be attributed to mental illness.
It was also unusual to see Metzl all but cheering the remarkable sentence — four consecutive life sentences, plus over 100 years — that Reinking received. Typically, the university-affiliated and the psychiatrists among us can be counted upon to dig up the perpetrator's difficult childhood in mitigation and call for leniency, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society. They abhor "mass incarceration." Not so here. To Metzl's ilk, there are some crimes worse than murder, and even though no jury convicted him of it, no punishment is too severe in response.
Over a year after the murders, Jonathan Metzl appeared on Bill Maher's talk show Real Time. He was promoting his recently released book, Dying of Whiteness. His first words were, "I'm a professor and a doctor." He summarized his book's then-fashionable thesis, that white rural voters are too stupid to understand that Republican policies, including opposition to gun restrictions, work to their detriment. He never mentioned Travis Reinking's murders at the Waffle House.
Nearly six years after the murders, Metzl returns to the bookshelves to give the Waffle House murders the racial angle that broad coverage in national and international media failed to uncover. Despite that neither NPR and CNN saw fit to conclude from the races of the murderer (white) and four victims (black) that Reinking murdered out of racial hatred, Metzl doubts that a clearly manifested and undiagnosed mental illness was the proximate cause of the carnage. Instead, the race-obsessed Metzl psychoanalyzes Reinking — even invoking Freud — and concludes that it was secret racism after all. This is because, and I'm not making this up, when Reinking went to the White House, he said he was a sovereign citizen, and some sovereign citizens are also white supremacists. (Sovereign citizens are not known for entering into deferred prosecution agreements with the government, as Reinking did. A cursory review of traffic stops on YouTube will satisfy the curious viewer of the diversity of folks who say silly things to the police. And I don't mean to sound unkind, but schizophrenics are not always celebrated for their factual accuracy.)
Now, about the only offbeat thing that Travis Reinking did not do was show any evidence of racism, either against his victims or anyone else. Had he done so, the reader can be sure that Metzl would have brought it to his attention. Metzl may shrug at Reinking's schizophrenia, but it takes neither a gun enthusiast or a psychiatrist to see that Reinking's behavior was abnormal. Because of his condition, a judge initially found him incompetent to stand trial — a remarkably difficult finding to make that requires that the defendant is either unable to understand the proceedings, unable to assist his attorneys in defending himself, or both. When a criminal defendant is found incompetent to stand trial, he is ordered to receive psychiatric treatment, whether he likes it or not. Metzl inexplicably withheld this information from his readers. Someone thought Reinking was sick, including a judge, a psychologist who testified in support of his defense that he was not guilty by reason of insanity, and probably the prosecution, which declined to seek the death penalty, a decision that was likely influenced by Supreme Court jurisprudence concerning executing the mentally ill, such as Atkins v. Virginia (2002).
A funny thing about this is that my own views on gun reform largely track with Metzl's. But the racism angle was sloppy and slapdash, so that the title does not fit the text. Rather than a level discussion of gun control, this book is unsure of what it tries to be. Of all the cases to showcase as an exemplar of structural racism, Reinking's is an odd choice. According to his website, Metzl seems to study the intersection of guns and race, so maybe it is little wonder that he connects them in What We've Become. I am curious to know how mental-health professionals would react to his opinion that mass shootings should not be attributed to mental illness.
It was also unusual to see Metzl all but cheering the remarkable sentence — four consecutive life sentences, plus over 100 years — that Reinking received. Typically, the university-affiliated and the psychiatrists among us can be counted upon to dig up the perpetrator's difficult childhood in mitigation and call for leniency, rehabilitation, and reintegration into society. They abhor "mass incarceration." Not so here. To Metzl's ilk, there are some crimes worse than murder, and even though no jury convicted him of it, no punishment is too severe in response.
March 13, 2024
The axis of this book is the mass shooting in a Nashville Waffle House on April 22, 2018. Four people were killed and four more were injured. Around this shooting the author looks at how treating gun violence as a public health problem is complicated by the gun culture in the United States. Study after study has shown that looser gun laws lead to more gun deaths, but the majority of gun owners won’t tolerate any gun safety laws that they feel inconveniences them in the slighted even if it improves safety for a great many of their fellow Americans.
March 9, 2024
Made me want to invest in gun manufacturers. There is no future for gun reform until the makeup of the Supreme Court changes. As a majority of this country sees it, no amount of gun violence will make them believe there should be fewer guns. They think the opposite is the solution to save their lives. Don't read this looking for hope.
October 5, 2024
2.5 stars, rounded up to 3 to be charitable
Honestly felt let down by this book. Metzl is one of those doctor writers who feel the need to remind people every 3 pages that he indeed is an ~MD and a renowned public health researcher~ instead of letting his mastery of the topic speak for itself. It really shows that medical schools clearly do not emphasize rhetoric nor quality of writing (beyond cliched flowery statements of indignation) in their curricula (and I can corroborate that with lived experience because what language are those medical journals even written in?).
For a book that hinges on the idea that America’s obsession with whiteness (and the importance of guns to protecting this whiteness) is a public health problem, Metzl never defines whiteness, nor public health for that matter. There’s lots of handwringing about how guns contribute to increased mortality in people of color, suicides, etc., which is a statistic that could have been better amplified if Metzl had a rigorous theoretical framework for deeply complex themes like white vigilanteism in the wake of Black Reconstruction. This is truly such a shame, because this book truly had the potential to connect ethnic studies/African American studies with public health in a way I’d never seen before, but instead, the book backslid into the old and tired liberal campaign of increased gun control that the book itself decries as ineffective.
The author takes a really interesting and somewhat convoluted path to arguing that gun violence is often a white crime on POCs. Since Reinking, the shooter in the Waffle House case in 2018, never showed any signs of racial animosity, Metzl goes on to say, “if he weren’t white, none of this would have happened” and goes on to detail how in his very white and rural hometown, Reinking was allowed to keep his guns despite many other threatening incidents. I guess the point is that America’s patchwork system of gun regulation is as much at fault as Reinking himself is. I’m still confused about the way Metzl went about making this argument.
The most frustrating part is that Metzl puts his thesis at the end: to stop gun violence is to take the proactive approach of fostering community via increasing access to public transportation and housing and food, making more public parks, etc. and I totally agree! Just why did he leave it to the end (literally the epilogue) and why did he not give enough time or space to develop the thought further?
This is where I think Black and Brown radical thinkers diverge from White academic institutions—instead of waffling around in statistics and getting stuck in nihilism, these thinkers actually dare to make strong arguments and imagine and suggest what a different future could look like.
Honestly felt let down by this book. Metzl is one of those doctor writers who feel the need to remind people every 3 pages that he indeed is an ~MD and a renowned public health researcher~ instead of letting his mastery of the topic speak for itself. It really shows that medical schools clearly do not emphasize rhetoric nor quality of writing (beyond cliched flowery statements of indignation) in their curricula (and I can corroborate that with lived experience because what language are those medical journals even written in?).
For a book that hinges on the idea that America’s obsession with whiteness (and the importance of guns to protecting this whiteness) is a public health problem, Metzl never defines whiteness, nor public health for that matter. There’s lots of handwringing about how guns contribute to increased mortality in people of color, suicides, etc., which is a statistic that could have been better amplified if Metzl had a rigorous theoretical framework for deeply complex themes like white vigilanteism in the wake of Black Reconstruction. This is truly such a shame, because this book truly had the potential to connect ethnic studies/African American studies with public health in a way I’d never seen before, but instead, the book backslid into the old and tired liberal campaign of increased gun control that the book itself decries as ineffective.
The author takes a really interesting and somewhat convoluted path to arguing that gun violence is often a white crime on POCs. Since Reinking, the shooter in the Waffle House case in 2018, never showed any signs of racial animosity, Metzl goes on to say, “if he weren’t white, none of this would have happened” and goes on to detail how in his very white and rural hometown, Reinking was allowed to keep his guns despite many other threatening incidents. I guess the point is that America’s patchwork system of gun regulation is as much at fault as Reinking himself is. I’m still confused about the way Metzl went about making this argument.
The most frustrating part is that Metzl puts his thesis at the end: to stop gun violence is to take the proactive approach of fostering community via increasing access to public transportation and housing and food, making more public parks, etc. and I totally agree! Just why did he leave it to the end (literally the epilogue) and why did he not give enough time or space to develop the thought further?
This is where I think Black and Brown radical thinkers diverge from White academic institutions—instead of waffling around in statistics and getting stuck in nihilism, these thinkers actually dare to make strong arguments and imagine and suggest what a different future could look like.
November 5, 2023
You're not "power brokering" away anyone's second amendment civil rights. If you do, they'll come for your first amendment rights next. And don't believe anyone who says that they don't want to shred the first amendment tok. "Hate speech" sentence enhancement, permits to congregate in public spaces, and government collusion with Big Tech to suppress freedom of speech are *already happening.* So, yeah, guns are the only thing protecting your ability to talk about how bad guns are. Keep treating the second amendment like a second class right, and you can start counting down days til your newspaper needs government approval to print and you're not allowed to go anywhere that speaks out against random "public health" mandates, or even write a letter to your congressman, without getting sent to the gulag.
It's amazing that people don't think back to their history books. Remember when King George was treating us like shit and we started to complain too loudly? What was the first thing he tried to do, take away our guns. You might check but I'm pretty sure Hitler did that to the Jews before he exterminated 90% of them. And here we are, with people still telling us we'll be so much better off without our guns. No thanks. Where I live, everyone has guns and everyone is friendly and there's no crime to speak of. I'd hate to live someplace where defenseless people just have to pray the bad guys won't do bad guy things for the half hour it takes the police to get to a call in some of our cities. Sad.
It's amazing that people don't think back to their history books. Remember when King George was treating us like shit and we started to complain too loudly? What was the first thing he tried to do, take away our guns. You might check but I'm pretty sure Hitler did that to the Jews before he exterminated 90% of them. And here we are, with people still telling us we'll be so much better off without our guns. No thanks. Where I live, everyone has guns and everyone is friendly and there's no crime to speak of. I'd hate to live someplace where defenseless people just have to pray the bad guys won't do bad guy things for the half hour it takes the police to get to a call in some of our cities. Sad.
February 20, 2024
Metzl makes a compelling case for change, but his timely and well-researched book also leaves us discouraged about the obstacles to reducing firearm deaths in the U.S. The author frames the gun reform debate through the story of the April 2018 mass shooting at a Nashville-area Waffle House. The gunman was a mentally disturbed white man from Illinois who should not have had access to guns, while all of the victims - those who survived and those who did not - were all black and brown.
Metzl writes movingly about the victims, the horror of the shooting, the impacts on their families. He also details pertinent details about the life of Travis Reinking, a troubled young man whose multiple interactions with police and citizens provided every chance for him to have been arrested or denied access to guns. But this is America, specifically, red state Tennessee, and Reinking is a white man given all the breaks that those in the majority race often get.
What We've Become focuses on how the system is set up to fail gun violence victims time and time again. It's heavy on policy and politics, but there's no other way to tell the story. I, for one, will long remember the important details this book leans on to honor those whose lives are forever shattered by gun violence.
Metzl writes movingly about the victims, the horror of the shooting, the impacts on their families. He also details pertinent details about the life of Travis Reinking, a troubled young man whose multiple interactions with police and citizens provided every chance for him to have been arrested or denied access to guns. But this is America, specifically, red state Tennessee, and Reinking is a white man given all the breaks that those in the majority race often get.
What We've Become focuses on how the system is set up to fail gun violence victims time and time again. It's heavy on policy and politics, but there's no other way to tell the story. I, for one, will long remember the important details this book leans on to honor those whose lives are forever shattered by gun violence.
October 13, 2024
Simultaneously scholarly, thoughtful and gut wrenching, the author examines why America's public health approach to gun violence and "commonsense gun control" has failed so abysmally.Besides the obvious Blue states versus Red states conflict, it boils down to what guns represent: white male power and a naked effort by Southern states to erode Northern states stability. The South shall rise again, by making its worship of gun ownership a sacred duty.Metzyl frames this power struggle with the tragic specifics of the 2018 Waffle House shooting in Tennessee. Despite the heroic and heart rending efforts of survivors, we seem to have gained nothing. This is a despairing book, not designed to uplift, but only to tell naked truth: there is no right to a safe public space. And to call out Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito, in his ruling on New Yirk gun laws, as an agent of chaos. Indeed.
February 24, 2024
I like Metzl and wanted to like this but it's not a major book, I don't think. It doesn't really have ideas about confronting gun violence. He's clear about what is NOT working, which is, "gun violence is a public health problem and blue-state public health measures need to be adopted across the country." It's not clear if those don't work AT ALL or if they just won't work in red states for political reasons. There is a surprising lack of actual data in this book. For instance, he makes a good point about how the phenomenon of "mass shootings" gets linked up with "white men," ignoring all the other mass shooting incidents that involve different populations, but he doesn't give any data about those other shootings (maybe they don't exist, but he could give it a shot, no pun intended).
May 5, 2024
I listened to this book and the author kept my interest, especially when he went into details on the Nashville Waffle House massacre: the stories of the victims and the perpetrator’s many transgressions and acts of craziness BUT still kept his guns.
This insistence on no gun restrictions by the right is a public health hazard that i assume they are willing to live with. According to the CDC the 10 highest firearm mortality rate states are red states (voted for Trump) with one exception: New Mexico. These states are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee. Mostly rural states! The 10 lowest mortality rates are in blue states (including New York and California) except Nevada at #10.
This insistence on no gun restrictions by the right is a public health hazard that i assume they are willing to live with. According to the CDC the 10 highest firearm mortality rate states are red states (voted for Trump) with one exception: New Mexico. These states are Mississippi, Louisiana, Alabama, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Arkansas, Missouri, Tennessee. Mostly rural states! The 10 lowest mortality rates are in blue states (including New York and California) except Nevada at #10.
April 27, 2024
I’m giving this a 3 rather than a 2 mostly because I found his critiques of public health approaches to be accurate and humbling as a public health professional and I learned from that. He centered the book around the Nashville Waffle House shooting. His statements about racism were very random and not woven into the context of the story which takes away from the impact of what may have been a legitimate factor in how the shooter chose the scene of his victims. I was also disappointed at the lack of action steps he provided to affect change. I share the general perspectives of this author, most likely, but didn’t feel like the book came together the way I’d hoped.
December 28, 2024
Such a sad accounting of the insanity of gun regulations in this country. There is clearly a problem when mass shootings are a daily occurrence in this country. Many of these are people that for obvious reasons shouldn’t be in possession of firearms. Obviously. There are solutions that would do better to regulate the distribution of weapons while protecting the rights of responsible gun owners. But we as a country suck at that. Mostly because gun manufacturers make money selling guns and any restrictions sound like list money and they fight hard to not lose money. Fuck them. Cheers!
April 27, 2025
I wanted to find this book compelling, as it focuses on a tragic event close to home. And I was expecting to be drawn in more, as the author did in Dying of Whiteness. But this one didn’t do it. Dry and even boring at times. I don’t mind a good use of statistical information, but the usage here was just dry. Worse yet, if the author was hoping to convince some skeptics to come to his point of view, I’m afraid it probably failed. Whichever side of the gun debate you were on before reading this book, you’re still there. 2 stars.
July 15, 2025
Unfortunately, this is another necessary read about the state of gun deaths in our country. As it continues to be the number one cause of death in America, the author does a nice job showing how gun ownership has become a totem of identity politics and continued racial animosity in America drive a refusal to address the issue. The sadness part of this is that we know how to lessen gun violence and it works in places that have tighter gun laws but we refuse to do it and in fact are running in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, we love our guns more than your children.
January 18, 2025
Excellent book on the issue of gun violence. The author had been focusing on it as a public health problem but his story of a shooter in Nashville show him that it is a gun possession issue. His description of the victims at the Waffle House were hard to read.
The culture of society in the United States (particularly in the South) needs to change. Metzl gives many suggestions for action for a better place for everyone.
The culture of society in the United States (particularly in the South) needs to change. Metzl gives many suggestions for action for a better place for everyone.
May 7, 2024
Using a deep analysis of one horrific mass killing to underscore the failure of public health against the American cancer of mass shootings humanizes what can be too hard to face. The most compelling chapter, however, is the last, and one that I hadn't previously considered. Meanwhile, the callousness of humans towards each other revealed thoughout this is appalling.
July 1, 2024
I thought this book was okay, but it was a bit disappointing. I don’t quite understand what the thesis of the book is: are guns a public health problem? What is the right strategy? What is the path forward. I thought at times the book was riveting, but I feel like the book just ends without real tangible perspectives on what to do.
January 22, 2025
I found it interesting to dissect the flaws and issues with attempting to regulate gun control through the lens of a public health issue in a nation with so much systemic racism built into its foundations. Unfortunately the author has no good solutions, but I suppose we can’t fault him for that because we as an entire nation can’t seem to figure out the solution here either.
March 19, 2025
Definitely a book worth reading. I found the book to be informative but also lacked a definitive direction. He seems to contradict himself, but I think he was trying to make the reader think. The fact this book exists in the nation makes me sick. I just want to make one very clear statement: my kids are more important than your guns.
May 8, 2025
This was a difficult read as a survivor. But I felt it was important to learn. Unfortunately a lot of it was painful, uninformative, & dismal. I was hoping to find new solutions or hope but found none. It was very saddening, but I will continue with my advocacy because when you lose someone you love you have NO CHOICE. Unfortunately there will continue to be more of us everyday in America.
November 29, 2023
Finished this one last week... it made a lot of sense in the long run but it did get a bit tedious at points in time. The one part that was the best explanation was the dialog in the Supreme Court portion...
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 28, 2024
This was really powerfully framed. I found Metzl's thesis interesting and compelling, but at times it did get lost in layers of story (which is not a criticism I make often. I love a story in my nonfiction).
March 22, 2025
This book feels tedious to read only because it is so disturbing. Maybe it ends with the US returning to its past of the wild Wild West. All I know is that the reach of the NRA is farther than I ever imagined. This equates to Republican leadership. All hail the 2nd Amendment!
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